setTimeout, Onmouseout

[Paul Davies]

Hi,

I have created a very simple way of using a floating menu. I created an
Absolute positioned DIV tag, with ID menunews (There will be others) and the
status hidden.

This is called by

<a href="javascript:;"
onMouseover="document.getElementById('menunews').s tyle.visibility='visible'"

News</a>

Because of the multiple menu ID's I want to time out the menu, so I had set
the following in the DIV Tag

<div id="menunews" onmouseout="el=this;setTimeout
('el.style.visibility=\'hidden\'',1500)" >

However this has the drawback that if the DIV tag is not hovered over the
script does not work. Can the setTimeout be included in the <a> link?

Any and all help much appreciated.

P.

[RobG]

Paul Davies wrote:

Hi,

I have created a very simple way of using a floating menu. I created an
Absolute positioned DIV tag, with ID menunews (There will be others) and the
status hidden.

This is called by

<a href="javascript:;"
What is the point of an A element where the href attribute contains an
empty statement? A much better idea is to put something useful in there:

<a href="news.html" onclick="return false;" ...>News</a>

onMouseover="document.getElementById('menunews').s tyle.visibility='visible'"
And for browsers that don't support getElementById or don't have
scripting enabled?

>

News</a>

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of drop-down menus available on
the web - some use pure CSS with no scripting at all. Googling "HTML
CSS drop-down menus" returns about 2,000,000 hits.

The better ones will continue to be functional even if scripting and CSS
are not available.

Because of the multiple menu ID's I want to time out the menu, so I had set
the following in the DIV Tag

<div id="menunews" onmouseout="el=this;setTimeout
('el.style.visibility=\'hidden\'',1500)" >

However this has the drawback that if the DIV tag is not hovered over the
script does not work. Can the setTimeout be included in the <a> link?

Yes, but the canceling and re-setting logic gets quite convoluted -
there are simpler solutions. Users generally expect something to happen
immediately when they click on or mouseover/out some element, using
setTimeout to delay a response by 1.5 seconds may cause confusion and
frustration.
--
Rob
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