So, following on from my ‘why don’t my buttons work’ thread last week, I ask my webgeek mate to help me do some nice buttons with rollover and hit states. Apparently, using Flash isn’t the way to do it.

‘So how do I do it, then?’

‘Use HTML’

‘How?’

‘give each of your links a class

so put class=”button”, or something inside the < a> tag

then in your stylesheet put:

.button{

width: button_graphic_width

height: button_graphic_height

display: inline-block;

text-indent: -99999px;

}

oh and also

background: url(‘/image/button_graphic’) 0 0 no-repeat;

or wherever you put the button graphics

then put:

.button:hover

{

background: url(‘/image/button_graphic_rollover’) 0 0 no-repeat;

}

you might need a different class for each link because the rollovers are different colours

or you could use two classes:

class=”button green-button”

and just change the button:hover to green-button:hover

and so on for each different link

there’ll be loads of examples on line

make some kind of sense?’

Er, no! I speak English, no some geek code. Can you not explain in real language, please?

Apparently not.

Do people lose the ability to communicate properly, when they get into doing all this ‘code’ stuff???

FWIW; the buttons actually appear, and have their rollover and hit states, but clicking on them doesn’t actually do anything. I have to place linked text underneath, which kind of defeats the object.

**** Geeks. I woon’t mind, but it’s us ‘arty types’ with a sense of aesthetics, that make your stuff look good! Who looks at the bloody code? Only other geeks!

FFS.

Get back to your crayons and leave the site-building to the people who understand it 😉

Who looks at the bloody code? Only other geeks!

And web browsers, which are what make the pretty pictures appear.

You could always stick with your pretty Flash buttons that don’t work, and may well be illegal.

so someone complaining about the use of jargon includes ‘FWIW’ and ‘FFS’ in their rantm with no apparent irony intended…

Illegal??? WTF???

Marvellous.

So I’m a criminal, now???

I was asking for advice that I could understand. It wasn’t explained to me in a way that I could.

‘How can I, a non-geek, make nice buttons with rollover and hit states? I don’t understand HTML, Java, or any of that other stuff, I need instructions in plain English. is that too much to ask?’

It appears so…

so someone complaining about the use of jargon includes ‘FWIW’ and ‘FFS’ in their rantm with no apparent irony intended…

Before he edited it (twice, I think), his post wasn’t formatted properly either 🙂

so you want someone to explain how to do a techie piece of work, without him showing you how to do it??? RTFM or stop whinging and be thankful hes taken time out to help you do something which you couldn’t do by yourself

Do people lose the ability to communicate properly, when they get into doing all this ‘code’ stuff???

That’s a bit like complaining when you go abroad that foriegners should put more effort into their ability to speak English 🙂

Illegal??? WTF???

Marvellous.

So I’m a criminal, now???

Disability Discrimination Act. Flash navigation is a major accessibility no no.

i dont understand your point.

How are you supposed to learn Chinese if they can’t speak English?

computers are very stupid – you have to make up the shortfall…

LOL!

Before he edited it (twice, I think), his post wasn’t formatted properly either

It’s so true. I was thinking ‘WTF is going on here??’ -everything I typed out appeared as a link!

How are you supposed to learn Chinese if they can’t speak English?

Ah, at least SOMEBODY understands what I’m getting at!!!

I don’t know this code stuff. I asked for an explanation that I could understand. I got the above code gobbledygook.

Not helpful.

So you want to write a program, but you don’t want to understand the language you need to write it in….

so how would he explain it then? write about 3 pages of test, that would eventually have to use the code you don’t understand.
I don’t understand quantum phsyics, if I needed to understand it I’d buy a book and read it, I wouldn’t hassle a friend, then get upest when i didn’t understand what he was talking about…

NO! I DON’T WANT TO WRITE A BLOODY PROGRAM! I WANT TO PUT SOME SIMPLE **** BUTTONS INTO A SIMPLE **** WEBSITE!!!!!!!!!!

I’m using Dreamweaver, which is for us non-geeks to be able to produce simple websites. The rest of the site is fine, just not the buttons.

Which incidentally, work fine on my Mac, in Safari, but nowhere else.

The Geek has NO answer to that one, does he?

err yes he will have an answer, namely: different browsers ‘read’ code in different ways…

Do you know what a browser is?

Sorry RudeBoy but you can only symplify things so much. If you asked Stephen Hawkin to explain some of his work to you, it’d be fair to expect you to perhaps need at least physics degree first, maybe more.

If you can’t understand what you were told, it’s not your mates fault, you’re just not equipped with the basic skills required to do html and css.

I asked for an explanation that I could understand

some things are complicated, and can take, hours, days or years to learn. They cannot necessarily be explained in a few pithy sentences

The Geek has NO answer to that one, does he?
He’s probably feinting ignorance. It’s quite a handy thing to do in these situations 🙂

“work fine on my Mac, in Safari, but nowhere else.

The Geek has NO answer to that one, does he? “

where 2 or 3 geeks are gathered together browser compatability issues is not far down the agenda of items to be discussed and have heads shaken over.

I’m using Dreamweaver

there’s your big mistake, this was fashioned by the Antichrist 🙁

Well it’s very straight forward but I appreciate there is a bit of a learning curve.

First – HTML: this defines what your page does, and what it is made of.
e.g.
Singletrack
is a hyperlink written html.

Secondly, the CSS is how you decide what each of the html elements will look like. CSS is ‘Cascading Style Sheet’ because the styles cascade, that is their properties get passed down to their child elements.

So if I wanted to style that hyperlink I just wrote I’d give it a class.

Singletrack

and style it (in my CSS file)
.callmewhateveryoulike {
width: 25px;
height: 15px;
any other properties you want this to have…
}

the best way to learn is too look at the source code of websites. There are many HTML elements, and many styles that can be applied.

The above example is a very simple one.

EDIT: this forum is turning all my code into actual markup – just view source!

If it were easy to do everything, then no-one would make any money doing it. There has to be a line somewhere, buttons are it in this case. You have to get off your backside and learn it, or else pay someone to do it.

Very poor rant.

Have you tried switching it off and on again?

main() {
printf(“hello, Stupid!”);
}

🙂

If it were easy to do everything, then no-one would make any money doing it. There has to be a line somewhere, buttons are it in this case. You have to get off your backside and learn it, or else pay someone to do it.

Very poor rant.

A justified rant though – I wouldn’t make a living doing this if it was easy but it’s amazing how every seems to thing making a website is something that just anybody should be able to do.

Christ, I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade and I’m still in awe at how awesome some others people are at this!

but it’s amazing how every seems to thing making a website is something that just anybody should be able to do

it is! Making a good website is much harder 🙂

gees… quite a rant considering that the only issue seems to be you don’t understand html/css.

If I was your ‘**** geek’ mate I certainly wouldn’t be bothering to help you again…

NO! I DON’T WANT TO WRITE A BLOODY PROGRAM! I WANT TO PUT SOME SIMPLE **** BUTTONS INTO A SIMPLE **** WEBSITE!!!!!!!!!!

Further evidence of where the problem lies. A website is a program.

Damn, and this program doesn’t seem to allow me to delete a post when I’ve accidentally clicked twice, only edit it!

Its a classic thing to do to protect your professional interests – create a language that outsiders cannot understand to increase the myth of how hard it is to do.

Medicalese is another example. used to protect the closed shop of healthcare workers and to prevent them being questioned.

Blimey.

Seems to me your friend went to a lot of trouble to help. The fact that you expect to be able to write a set up a website without apparently wanting to make the effort of understanding HTML or Cascading Style Sheets (or doing any research for yourself) is your fault not his. Either take what he says on trust or go to the trouble of finding out for yourself.

TJ – a lot of professional language is developed because it allows people who understand the fundamentals of a subject to communicate complex ideas quickly and accurately. It’s not designed to create a closed shop, although it might serve that purpose as well.

READY
10 PRINT “BORED ALREADY”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

That’s about as far as I ever wanted to go, with code…

well why are you trying to write a website then?

so why are you ranting when someone suggests that you need to go further than an endless loop?

RudeBoy: websites are built using HTML and CSS. You really need to know at least a little of both them. Otherwise you are trying to build a house without knowing what bricks are or what keeps the roof on.

Having said that, doesn’t Dreamweaver offer rollover buttons that don’t use Flash? I’m sure it must! (as others have said, Flash is a bad way to do this, your friend has the right general idea)

FWIW, I used these same buttons in a website I made a few years ago, and they worked fine, as long as the correct FLash plugins were installed on whichever machine I wanted to view it on.

I asked why my buttons don’t work. The geek say’s ‘do it in HTML’ instead.

Not ‘I don’t know’.

I am fairly fluent in Photoshop. Not bad in Illustrator. I can do simple animations using Flash, with some very simple interactivity. I’m a competent photographer. I can use all this to produce some nice graphicky stuff.

All this bloke knows, is how to do code. He can’t do the pictures stuff; he has to come to me. And his sites look sh1t anyway; really nasty.

And he’s fat.

And has no hair.

I win!

wwaswas – you are probably right but it is used to exclude outsiders. Certainly in the medical world