vavroom

Forgot to update this thread with the link. You can see the result of this in action at https://cook.becanz.net if you haven’t seen it already ??

well, manstraw, not necessarily. And there’s more to it. Floating your li means you have to define a width for them, else you run into potential problems. I personally prefer to use display:inline, but that’s also very simplistic. And if you want to start styling things a little bit more fancy, there’s yet more to it than that. It’s easy, just not quite as simple as all that if you want to do it properly ??

lhk makes valid points, particularly in terms of “know your audience”, but I’d like to differ on hiw statement that:

“As to accessibility – indeed needed when doing public service/government sites, else it’s again a question of users most likely interested.”

There are many aspects and layers to this.

First, legally.

In the US, under Section 508 of the Vocal Rehabilitation Act, only Federal Government Agencies, or those providing services to said agencies, or those receiving a majority of their funding from said agencies, are required to comply with the Accessibility Guidelines of Section 508 (which incidentally covers MUCH more than just website but access to *any* electronic data).

There are arguments about non-governmental organisations and companies being included under the Americans with Disabilities Act. I think the jury’s still out.

More and more countries have adopted and are adopting online accessibility laws. Canada, UK, New Zealand, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Finland, India, Honk Kong, Ireland, Italy, to name a few…

Second, wider audience

Accessibility is not, contrary to popular belief, only about people with disabilities! It *is* about people using a wide range of devices, such as cell phones, PDAs, Lynx browser, etc, *as well* as those using screenreaders, voice driven input devices, etc. The most important thing for a website is its content, ultimately. Delivering content is important here, and if you have an unstyled page that delivers content properly, it doesn’t *matter* what it looks like if the person gets the *content* properly.

I completely disagree with the statement that only rich people on broadband can handle sites that are purely css driven. That’s ludicrous! In fact, if anything, it would be the reverse. A table driven layout often sees pages that are two and three time bigger than a css driven one achieving the same effect!

As to people in certain geographical areas of the world not being able to see the page, I assume you mean folks in places where they don’t have access to computers that can run generation 4/5/6 of the netscape/IE/opera browsers. This *is* a valid concern, although, if you have a css driven site, it is *easy* to detect the browser and deliver the CONTENT without the styling to those browsers known not to handle CSS properly.

Third, it’s about money.

While it may not be the law, it makes sense to have your site accessible to a wide audience, including people with disabilities. Ok, not everyone runs business websites, but for those of us who do, don’t forget that people with disabilities buy stuff too, with good money. If they cant’ navigate your site, they won’t spend their money at your place, no matter how good the product is.

If you are interested about this some more, which you probably aren’t by now ?? I wrote the following article for Mezzoblue (Dave Shea from CSS Zen Garden, who incidentally created one of the default templates for WP)

https://mezzoblue.com/archives/2003/08/10/accessibilit/index.php

Yes, yes, of course anyone can use tables for layout. Just like anyone can use a knife to turn a screw in. Doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for the job ??

thanks for that maerk, I hadn’t brought it up when searching.

It helps, but not entirely. I think it’s splendid to achieve part of my intent, that is, decide whether it’ll show a list or not depending on is it a parent or a child.

What I can’t wrap my head around is to list the children for a particular category only, in a ul, outside the loop.

I’ve looked at wp_list_cat, list_cat, but it doesn’t seem to do what I want.

And I’ll readily admit that I can follow php if it’s in front of me, but writing it, it’s a different logic entirely ?? I know what I want it to do, woudln’t know how to code it though.

Hmm, you’re opening a bag of worms here ?? There are many arguments for and many arguments against. Myself, I use tables only for tabular data, which is the reason the <table> tag was invented to start with.

Tabular data being defined as data that is best presented in rows and columns. So each “record” shares the same “fields”.

But… Why is CSS better? For starters, it’s usualy more accessible to people with disabilities (and bots… Google is “the ultimate blind user”). It is incredibly difficult to render tables properly through voice (trying to render a two dimmensional entity via a one dimmensional medium).

It also makes sense not to hard code presentation on your site. If you use tables, you limit yourself, the next time you’ll want to change your site, you’ll have to completely recode all your theme’s pages. Whereas if you have the site coded with css, you may just change the css file, and presto, you have a different layout.

Also, it gives greater flexibility to users coming to your site on alternate medium. Say, someone coming on with a cellphone. If you have a site relying on tables, it’s *really* hard to deliver the site in a different layout targetting small screen. If you have properly built divs, you can then assign an alternate stylesheet for the media=”handheld”, and you’re away laughing.

You can also easily prepare a print.css, which gives you control over what gets printed and how. You can strip out font colour, hide the sidebar and navigation (useless on a printed page), specify a good font size for print, etc. And you send it to media=”print”.

So, to me, using just CSS for layout gives me greater flexibility, and accessibility.

Now, granted, a poorly coded page relying on too many divs, with stuff all over the place is probably not a heck of a lot better than using tables.

My latest project (and first wordpress site) is a good example. If you look at https://cook.becanz.net and look at the page with styles turned off (easier in firefox than IE), you’ll see that I have content at the top (before navigation), which is arguably better for search engines. If you print a page, you’ll see that only the content prints, etc. You can even click on the high contrast button, and get a high contrast version of the site (good for some people with low vision), albeit the contrast stuff is not so much about layout as about design.

This thread may bring out a LOT of arguments… ?? YOu can also of course look on the web, loads of good places to find stuff about it. https://alistapart.com is one, or https://accessify.com another.

Cheers

Thanks Michael, that’s good to know, it was on my list of “to do” to figure out how to get this going.

hmm, would love if anyone coupd put it up somewhere again to grab. I’m in the same situation as original poster, the plugin sounds like it would be doing exactly what I need, but isn’t available. Do I wait for the new version to be released, or do I look elsewhere for a less satisfactory solution?

the pastebins are all not working ??

Thanks

Also found this neat plugin:
https://tela-web.com/wordpress-plugins/sticky-menu/

Once you have a menu generated in a ul, with css, you can make it do just about anything you want anyway, horizontal, vertical, hidden, etc.

Maybe one of these will do what you need?

https://www.nickbouton.com/delicious-tag-cloud

https://zak.greant.com/tags/category-cloud

https://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/

Note, I’ve not used any of them, just looking at this point ??

Have you read the file called “license.txt” that comes in the default wordpress install? Your questions are answered there. ??

if you’d looked at the tool, you would have seen that the external tool in question gives you various snippets of CSS to style your menus.

In other words, you can customise your list the way you want it.

So yes, it’s a css issue. And there are so many ways to make horizontal menus out of UL’s with css, it’s not really possible to give them to you here. Hence, the links, play with those, see how they are done.

Good luck.

If your menu is loading in lists, have a look at:

https://accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/list-o-matic/
or
https://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/

You may also want to look for “suckerfish” menus if you want css driven drop down menus if you have parent items with children in a sub-list.

Hope this helps.

How did you fix it? Looks good. ??

Except when you view the page without CSS, then it’s a bit hard to follow ??

heya syncbox, yeah, of course, I should have thought about it.

WARNING: if you don’t know what you’re doing with phpmyadmin, be careful, you can *REALLY* mess up your site.

The query I ran in the SQL tab was:

UPDATE wp_posts SET wp_posts.post_author = “2” WHERE (((wp_posts.post_author)=”1″));

the “2” is the ID of the new author, the “1” the ID of the current author.

Have fun ??