Centering Options or Frameset Alternative?

Hey all. I'm a migrant from the flash forum, as I'm more of a programmer and graphic designer than an HTML guru, so I've come to you fine folks as the Flash forum has always been very helpful.

I'm developing a site which uses a great deal of flash for navigational and "eye-candy" content. The .swfs then are intended to trigger the loading of accompanying html documents into a horizontally separated, connected frame via it's 'target'.

The content is dynamic in some situations, and can be varying lengths. Naturally, the window of the browser being used by the end user can be various heights as well. Thus, the problem (which I know has been discussed before here, I appologize in advance.

The problem is that, when a scrollbar is required to scroll the bottom frame, and is drawn, it offsets the alignment of the frames by a number of pixels (approx 5 to 10 depending on browser) and then there's netscape which probably just never draws it correctly in the first place (although I've yet to check.)

To see an example : http://www.gravitymusic.com/testindex.html/

My hope is that someone with some experience with a similar problem can suggest a fairly sound method of making this work with jscript and CSS and/or doctype switching and browser detection. It doesn't have to work in -every- browser, but the very least in most WC3 compliant browsers (I can honestly care less about NN4 as long as I have Mac/Win MSIE, Opera, Gecko-like compliancy)

I appriciate any help anyone has to offer in advance, and thanks

--
Aiden Bordner
Webmaster, Gravity Music
aiden_b (AT) gravitymusic (DOT) com

Hi,

I've also had what I think is the same problem as you.

Try taking out noresize in the frameset - this seemed to remedy the problem.

Good luck!

Thanks for the suggestion, but as I was afraid, that didn't work.

The only real solution for this problem is to use a method for centering that isn't dependant on scrollbar presence -- i.e., using jscript to attain window dimensions and manually spacing both tables by a specific number of pixels, updatable on.resize, etc. That way, I know both tables in both frames are spaced from the left the same amount regardless of what screwy method the browser has for drawing the CSS.

Even if it's not dead center, as long as they're both the same distance from the left-side wall and they're -basically- centered (at least visually to the average site visitor) I'm fine.

There must be a solution for this. The design really isn't that complicated!

-- Aiden

"aiden_m" webforumsuser (AT) macromedia (DOT) com wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion, but as I was afraid, that didn't work.

The only real solution for this problem is to use a method for centering that isn't dependant on scrollbar presence -- i.e., using jscript to attain window dimensions and manually spacing both tables by a specific number of pixels, updatable on.resize, etc. That way, I know both tables in both frames are spaced from the left the same amount regardless of what screwy method the browser has for drawing the CSS.

Even if it's not dead center, as long as they're both the same distance from the left-side wall and they're -basically- centered (at least visually to the average site visitor) I'm fine.

There must be a solution for this. The design really isn't that complicated!

-- Aiden

Taking away the "noresize" attribute has nothing to do with this, as you
already found out. The "noresize" option is there for preventing users
to grab a frame border in their browsers and move them.

This scrollbar phenomenon is really nothing you can do anything about,
more than finding a workaround. The situations you'll see this happen is
when you're in some way making the width depending (or in relation) to
the right window border, i.e. by centering or right aligning the content.

IE and Mozilla/NN have different approach in this respect. I'm not sure,
but I think IE *adds* real estate for the scroller and is using the
system scroll function, whereas Moz/NN *includes* the scroller's width
in the real estate. AFAIK, it's also have it's own scroll function. NB:
Don't take this for gospel...I can't remember exactly.

Anyway, to make content in different frames (which you shouldn't use,
btw) align even if a scroll is required, you need to align them left.
You can use e.g. the "Letterbox frameset" from www.projectseven.com
(site presently down, though) or from the DW Exchange at
www.macromedia.com and work from that by setting up a frameset
construction that allows you to left align all content, but still
appears to be centered (hope that made sense).

But, as I said, you should use flat pages, not frameset, if possible. By
doing that, you wouldn't have a problem like this behind you.

If this doesn't help or point in right direction, post back and we'll
dig in deeper.

Cheers,

--
Dan Vendel - *GOF*
http://www.vendel.info
Contact me directly by clicking here:
http://contact.vendel.info
Formmail tutorial:
http://www.vendel.info/tut/formmail.html
Nested table demonstration:
http://www.vendel.info/tabletut/

Dan, thanks for the help. I'll give some of those a try today.

The only reason I'm stuck using frames is the site design requires the change of HTML content (lower frame) without stopping the playback of the .swf content (top frame).

If there are alternative methods of achieving this goal (I'm not at all familliar yet with more advnaced methods of markup, such as CSS and DHTML) let me know, as I would be more than interested in any alternative to frames

-- Aiden