Controllable Navigation Bars with JavaScript, Part II - Dealing with those details
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In the first article, we developed a simple JavaScript function that works in conjunction with some CSS styles, and performs fairly decently the task of hiding and showing a side bar within a Web document. Let's remind ourselves how the function looked originally:
<script language="javascript">
switchBar=function(){
var navbar,content,swbar;
navbar=document.getElementById('navbar');
if(!navbar){return;}
content=document.getElementById('content');
if(!content){return;}
swbar=document.createElement('div');
swbar.id='switchbar';
swbar.title='hide navbar';
content.parentNode.insertBefore(swbar,content);
swbar.onclick=function(){
if(navbar.style&&swbar.style){
if(!navbar.style.display||navbar.style.display=='block'){
navbar.style.display='none';
swbar.style.backgroundImage='url(tab_right.gif)';
swbar.title='show navbar';
}
else{
navbar.style.display='block';
swbar.style.backgroundImage='url(tab_left.gif)';
swbar.title='hide navbar';
}
}
}
}
window.onload=function(){
if(document.getElementById&&document.createElement){
switchBar();
}
}
</script>
To work in conjunction with the above function, we had basically defined three contextual selectors to be applied to the main containing <div> elements and one additional for the switcher bar:
<style type="text/css">
body {
margin: 0;
}
#navbar {
float: left;
width: 15%;
height: 600px;
background: #ccf;
padding: 10px;
border-left: 1px solid #000;
border-bottom: 1px solid #000;
}
#switchbar {
float: left;
width: 18px;
height: 600px;
background: #fff url("tab_left.gif") repeat-y center center;
padding-top: 10px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
}
#content {
float: left;
width: auto;
padding: 10px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #000;
}
#headlines {
float: right;
width: 15%;
height: 600px;
background: #ccf;
padding: 10px;
border-left: 1px solid #000;
border-right: 1px solid #000;
border-bottom: 1px solid #000;
}
</style>
However, the primitive function was set up to work with fixed-height <div> elements, certainly something that I'd prefer to stay away from, at least for liquid design. Another important drawback is that we were using a value of "auto" for setting the width attribute for the main <div> container or "content" column, in order to make it expand and collapse in turn.
But here, we're stepping on the wet floor of browser incompatibilities. Is that pretty familiar to you? Yes, some browsers don't behave in the same manner when they have to interpret this value, which keeps it from being more widely used. So, we're going to tackle all of these odd points present in the original script and CSS declarations, and try to fix the buggy features, in order to gain functionality and make the whole code more compatible with most browsers. Are you ready to face the challenge? It's not so difficult.
Next: Cleaning up the CSS styles >>
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