[thelist] Drop down menus w/o layers & Printable pages

[aardvark]

> From: "Biddy Hughes" <biddy at s4i.com>
[...] 
> *  We're trying to find a solution for a scalable website that also contains
> drop down menus.

do you expect these menus to be dynamically generated by the 
site?  such as determined by a CMS and built on the fly based on 
the site content?

> In the past we've used DHTML & javascript and layers to create these
> drop-down menus....  It has been suggested that we can do this without using
> layers.....  this will enable the drop-down menus to move as the page
> scales...    Is anyone familiar with this?  If so, can you please point me
> to a resource that covers this?

for all users?  no... for IE4+ only users? well, still tricky, so i defer 
to someone else on that...

> Also, we're designing the site to 600x800 dimensions....and we must provide
> a printable page...  I understand that there is a tag/piece of code that can
> just pull the data out of the page when the visitor hits the print icon -
> i.e. it prints the page content instead of cutting off the page content at
> the 640 mark....  Is anyone familiar with this?

a tag?  no.  but CSS can be used to adjust the units from pixels 
(for instance) to points so the text will print at a reasonable size... 
maybe i'm missing your question here...

> I hear that this is only possible if the content is already in a database,
> and it is already being pulled out and placed into a template page, like an
> ASP website. Is this true?

for the most part, yes, but you don't *need* a database for this... 
you have a page template, and then you have a printing template... 
that printing template might be completely liquid and call a print-
friendly CSS, or it might be the same template with some colors 
turned off...  one example might be the printable version of all the 
pages at http://roselli.org/tour/ ... none of them are db-driven (ok, 
not really, it's driven from text files) and they all use the same 
template, just with a diffeerent CSS file and some color changes for 
printing...