Help with HTML (novice)

[Balou]

I?m currently trying to redo my small homepage properly by hand.
Since it?s the first I do this on my own, I try to stay away frome anything too fancy and just try to learn the basic underlying structure of web design.

My page already has a centered heading and some horizontally arranged buttons below it. What I want to do now, is to have the middle part change dynamically depending on which button is activated. The heading and menu should not reload everytime a link is clicked.

To my knowledge, using framesets would be a viable solution. However, I was wondering if there is also another way of accomplishing this without resorting to frames.
So, the directive is to have some area of by homepage change dynamically while the rest always stays the same.

Any suggestions and comments are welcome! Thanks for your help!

[supersmithy]

Frames are evil. Iframes are evil too - but not as evil as frames

They are pretty simple to use too - a google on "iframes" should give you what you want!

edit:

http://www.trans4mind.com/personal_d...de/iframes.htm

there are better ways, but they involve CSS and PHP - so I think iframes are for you!

[gingerj]

change the content with div's and innerHTML

it's the modern and best way to do it....

[Balou]

Thanks for the quick replies!

Iframes seem like a good way to do this. Are they allowed in strict code? Do current browsers support them?

I just did a quick search for innerHTML and it seems a lot more complicated than iframes. Maybe I can find a tutorial that helps me get into it, but at moment it is beyond my abilities.

By the way, why are frames so evil?

[supersmithy]

http://www.html-faq.com/htmlframes/?framesareevil

[gingerj]

By the way, why are frames so evil?

they dont validate
which means your not web 2.0 therefore not cool

[Balou]

I just managed to have iframes run in a small test environment:
Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Opera 8.5 display the page fine. The IE (6.0) does also display the iframes, but it apparently does not recognise the style types I entered in the header.
Are there any special notations I need to incorportate for the IE to display the css features correctly? Or is my IE version just too old?

Interesting article about frames...
I think for my little project, frames are fine. As soon as I feel comfortable with html and css I will advance to scripts etc. and free my page of any frames!

they dont validate

Does that mean I no longer have strict code if I use iframes? Do I need to refer to the frameset doctype when using iframes?

[Balou]

No further replies? I guess you?ve all been busy watching Snooker WC, eh..

Anyway, I can answer my question myself now:
Iframes are not allowed in strict doctype! They are valid in transitional doctype though.

The WC3 validation pages helped me figure this out:
WCE Markup Validator
WC3 CSS Validation (in German)

[Balou]

New question:

How do I place an object exactly on top of another object?

Explanation:
Basically I have a table with 3x3 grid and no borders. Inside the table are nine pictures.
Now I would like to lay another picture on top of the table. How do I do this the easy way?

I already managed to accomplish it via margin-this, margin-that, but it feels a bit messy, and in Opera it causes the scrollbar to appear.

[Balou]

Ok, I can answer yet another of my questions:
The page was displayed wrong in my Internet Explorer because the IE in my version does not recognise css elements with [id="name"] added.
If I just write #name the IE does recognise the css styles and the page is displayed properly.