FastMenu 1.04

A WYSIWYG editor for Web Page Popup Menus

Boutell.Com, Inc.

FASTMENU IS NOT FREE SOFTWARE. Free licenses are available to educational and nonprofit organizations.

See the "About" option of the Help menu for more information regarding the license governing this version of the product.

Credits and license terms
What's new in version 1.04
What is FastMenu?
How do I install menus in my web page?
How do I get started editing a menu?
How do I create menu items?
How do I enter URLs (links)?
How do I enter targets (for frames)?
How do I make submenus?
How do I cut, copy and paste menu items?
How do I change fonts, colors and borders?
How do I save my work?
How do I test my menus?
How do I re-edit existing menus?
How do I move a menu within the web page?
Why do my menus look / act different in Netscape 4?
Y2K Compliance Statement
For more information

What's New in Version 1.04

Horizontal menu bars are now supported! Those who prefer the "application look" can now create such menus with FastMenu.
Menu item highlighting disappears when the menu is no longer active.

What's New in Version 1.03

The target attribute is now supported for frames. Designers who use frames can now target any desired frame from any menu item. Those who do not use frames can simply leave the target field blank.

What's New in Version 1.02

Menus are now allowed inside <table align="center"> tags. FastMenu still refuses to insert a menu inside a table aligned to the left or right, flowing "in the gutter," because all major browsers appear to be quite confused about how to correctly display the menu in such situations. However, center-aligned tables do not create such problems.

What's New in Version 1.01

Three-tier menus and above are now compatible with Netscape 4.x. Thanks to J. Moon for detecting this issue.

What's New in Version 1.0

First release.

What is FastMenu?

FastMenu is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for dynamic HTML popup menus.

Popup menus allow you to provide a very complete menu of links without cluttering the page or confusing users. When the user "mouses over" one of the menu items, a submenu pops up, giving the user additional options. Each menu item can be the title of a submenu, a link to another page, or a simple label. In well-designed menus, every submenu title is also a link, in order to provide navigation for users of very, very old browsers, users who turn off Javascript, and users of browsers for the vision-impaired.

Before FastMenu became available, the creation of popup menus required difficult Javascript programming, with careful attention to cross-browser compatibility issues. FastMenu takes care of these concerns for you, installing high-quality Javascript and HTML code directly into your existing web page at the location you specify.

How do I install menus?

It's easy. To install menus, all you need is an existing HTML document! FastMenu does not require any special web browser components, external scripts or other supporting files. Just make sure the document is present on your drive, and start FastMenu. The program will immediately ask you what HTML document you wish to open. After you finish your editing, choose "Save HTML Document" from the file menu. FastMenu will automatically insert the proper tags and scripts into your HTML document. No muss, no fuss!

Very, very old web browsers do not support dynamic HTML. Specifically, Netscape browsers OLDER THAN Netscape 4 and Microsoft browsers OLDER THAN Internet Explorer 4 do not support this feature. However, FastMenu does provide a way to support these users! Users of these very old browsers will still see the very top level of menu items. As the designer, your responsibility is to make sure that you provide URLs for each of these top level items, so that the user can access pages that provide the same information that the submenus would otherwise have provided.

How do I get started editing a menu?

Once you have read the introductory hints, FastMenu will display a file selection dialog box. Use this dialog box to select an existing HTML document that you wish to add menus to. If you do not have any HTML documents yet, you should create one before using this program.

Next, you must decide exactly where the menu should be placed in the page. FastMenu will use Internet Explorer to display a special copy of your page, with special "target" icons at each acceptable location. To indicate your preferred location, just click on one of these icons! FastMenu will return to the foreground.

How do I create menu items?

Now that you have opened your document and indicated the location where your new menu should be placed, it is time to begin creating menu items. In the upper-left corner of the FastMenu window, you will see the words [First Item]. This text is a placeholder indicating where the first menu item will go.

Click on [First Item] and begin typing a label for the first item in your top level menu. These top level items are always seen in the page, even when the mouse is not over them.

After you enter a label for the first item, you should enter a URL for that item to link to. Because a small number of users turn off Javascript, use very old browsers, or are vision-impaired, it is very important to provide a URL for each item at the top level. This ensures that every visitor has an acceptable user experience (and, in most cases, an excellent user experience with full menus).

Once you have provided a label for the first item, you will notice a [Next Item] label beneath it. This is also a placeholder. You can click on [Next Item] to begin entering a label for the second top-level menu item.

Entering URLs

When you complete a label, click on the URL field or press the TAB key to move to the URL field. We recommend that you enter a URL for each and every menu item, even if you plan to attach a submenu as well. The URL you enter should be a complete, legal URL, and just the URL; no HTML tags are required. For example:

http://www.boutell.com/fastmenu/

Relative URLs such as filename.html are even better, because they still work if you move your documents to another site. Do not enter HTML tags in the URL field. Only the URL is needed.

Entering Targets (For Frames)

Normally, when a user clicks on a menu item, the link is followed in the current frame. If you wish to target a different frame, enter its name into the target field. To target the current frame, or if you do not use frames, just leave this field blank. If you do not understand frames, leave this field blank.

How do I create submenus?

After you entering the label for your first item, you will also notice a [First Item] label to the right of that item. This is a placeholder for the first menu item in a submenu to be attached to the item you have just completed. If you never click on [First Item] and enter a label, then the menu item simply will not have a submenu. However, if you do click on [First Item] and enter a label, a new submenu will be attached. Users will see the submenu when they move the mouse over the menu item it is attached to.

Enter a label and a URL for the first item in the submenu. After doing so, you will notice that a [Next Item] placeholder has appeared beneath the first item, allowing you to click there in order to add additional items to the submenu. Also, another [First Item] placeholder appears further to the right. You may "nest" your submenus up to four levels deep. However, most user interface designers do not recommend nesting more deeply than two or (at most) three levels. Of course, these design decisions are yours to make!

Notice that FastMenu displays an "arrow" pointing to the right when a menu item already has a submenu. This is for your convenience in the editor, and does not appear in the web page. The arrows allow you to remember which items contains submenus. To avoid cluttering the screen, submenus appear in the editor only when you have selected the menu item to which they are attached.

If you wish to display arrows or other graphics in your menu items in your actual web page, you may do so by entering HTML tags -- such as the <img> tag -- into your labels, in addition to plain text. To insert valid HTML tags in your labels, you must turn off the "Never Wrap Lines" option in the preferences dialog box. Otherwise, the spaces in those tags will be replaced by   (non-breaking space). Of course, teaching HTML is outside the scope of this manual. If you are not experienced with HTML, we recommend using plain text in your labels.

How do I cut, copy and paste menu items?

After you have spent some time editing your menu, you will probably want to make changes. Changing an existing menu item is easy: just click on the item, then click on the URL field, label field or target field to edit them. But what about deleting, copying and pasting menu items and their attached submenus?

To remove a menu item completely, just click that item with the mouse to select it, and then click on the Delete Item button at the bottom right of the window. If the menu item has a submenu attached, FastMenu will prompt you to confirm this action, as the entire submenu will also be removed.

You can also remove a menu item using the Cut Menu Item option of the Edit menu. In addition, you can then choose to paste the menu item back into the menu at another location. Select a menu item, click "cut", and then select the item in front of which the removed item should be inserted back into the document. Then choose Paste Menu Item from the edit menu. Like the delete button, these features cut and paste not just the menu item selected but also any submenu attached to it.

Finally, you can copy a menu item without removing it, and then paste it at another location to create a dupliate. To do so, select the menu item with the mouse and then select Copy Menu Item from the Edit menu. You can now use Paste Menu Item to put the item back into the page at another location.

What about copying and pasting text?

Even though the ordinary Cut, Copy and Paste menu items for text do not appear in FastMenu, you may still use the standard control-X, control-C and control-V keys to cut, copy and paste text when working with text fields such as the label, URL and target fields.

How do I change fonts, colors, and borders?

You may or may not like our standard choices for fonts, colors, and menu border thickness. Feel free to change them. Pull down the File menu and click Preferences to display the preferences dialog box.

This dialog box allows you to change the text color, the link color (the text color when a URL is present), the background color of the menu, the color of the border area, the thickness of the border, and the font used to display text. Each of these items is listed in the dialog box; for each color, a sample "swatch" of the color appears to the right.

Editing the colors is easy. For example, click on Edit Background Color to display the standard Windows color selection dialog box. In addition to the standard Windows colors, a more sophisticated palette of colors appears on the right-hand side of this box. Using this palette, nearly any color can be selected. When you have made your selection, click OK. Notice that your changes are immediately reflected in your menu, for easy previewing.

Changing the font is almost as easy. Click on Edit Text Font to change the font used for menu text. You will now see the standard Windows font selection dialog box.

Note On Font Sizes: your choice of font, as well as your preference for bold, italic, neither or both, will be expressed exactly in the web page. Your choice of font size will be converted to the nearest of the seven standard web font sizes (the <size> attribute of the <font> tag). Very small changes in font size may not have the expected results.

Finally, the Preferences dialog box also allows you to set the thickness of the menu border, in pixels. It is possible to set this value to 0 if you prefer no border at all.

When you click OK to leave the preferences dialog box, your color, font and border thickness changes become permanent for the current web page. (In the event that you choose to install more than one distinct set of menus in a single web page, these preferences are shared by all of them.) If you do not like the changes you have made, click on Revert To Default to undo them, or click on Cancel to undo them and leave the preferences dialog box.

If you like your changes very much, you may wish to have them used automatically for all future menus that you create. In order to do this, click on Save As Default. This button allows you to permanently store your current font, color and border thickness preferences for use in future menus.

How do I save my work?

When you are finished creating your menus, just pull down the File menu and pick Save HTML Document.

If you are simultaneously editing your document in another program, which we do not recommend, you may receive an error message saying that the file cannot be written to. If this occurs, choose Save As... from the file menu, and pick a different filename. Do not edit the same document in two programs at one time as you will very likely overwrite the work of one when making changes in the other. Close the document in your HTML editor before opening it with FastMenu.

How do I test my menus?

After saving your work, open your web page with your web browser. You may need to Reload or Refresh to make sure you are looking at the latest version of the page. You will find that your menus are immediately available and responsive to the movement of the mouse. Clicking on individual menu items will follow the URLs that you have entered. If submenus do not appear, or menu items do not highlight when you move the mouse in Internet Explorer (this feature is not available in Netscape 4), make sure you have Javascript turned on in your browser.

How do I re-edit existing menus?

To open an existing menu and make changes, just use the Open HTML Document option on the file menu to select the document. As before, you will see your page displayed in your web browser, with special target icons. However, you will also see the words [REOPEN MENU] near each existing menu. Click on these words to reopen an existing menu. FastMenu will re-display the menu and allow you to make and save additional changes.

How do I move a menu to another location in a page?

To move a menu to another location in a web page, just select Move Menu Within Page from the Edit menu. FastMenu will once again display your web page in your web browser, with target icons. Click on the target icon to which the menu should be moved. To leave the menu where it is now, click on [REOPEN MENU].

Why do my menus look / act different in Netscape 4?

The dynamic HTML features of Netscape 4 are greatly inferior to those of Internet Explorer 4 and above. They are also considerably less reliable when faced with demanding appliations. In fact, the new Netscape 6 browser (and the related Mozilla browser) do not use the old dynamic HTML features of Netscape 4. They have instead replaced them with a new set of standards-compliant dynamic HTML features.

FastMenu does work with Netscape 4; popup submenus are fully displayed and completely usable. However, to greatly increase the stability and reliability of each user's experience, we have kept our support for Netscape 4 as simple as possible. Specifically, menu items do not "highlight" when the mouse moves over them, and the popup location of the submenu is based on the location of the mouse at the time the mouse first moves over the attached menu item. These simplifications allow Netscape 4 to reliably display popup menus without unexplained crashes and other unwanted behavior.

Year 2000 (Y2K) Compliance Statement

All versions of FastMenu are fully Year 2000 compliant.

Certain aspects of FastMenu rely on your computer's operating system. We are not responsible for faults in the underlying operating system. If your operating system reports false information to FastMenu after the year 2000, that is beyond our control or responsibility.

Please feel free to contact Boutell.Com with any further questions.

If You Have Problems

Common Problems (Read First!)

If you don't see popup submenus in your browser, turn on Javascript in your Internet Options control panel (for Internet Explorer) or in the Preferences dialog boxes of Netscape and other browsers. Also make sure you have at least Netscape 4 or above, and/or Internet Explorer 4 and above. FastMenu also supports Mozilla, Netscape 6, Opera and other browsers to the extent that they support dynamic HTML standards.

If you see highlighting but not submenus, it is possible that the browser is incorrectly reporting the location on of the menu items, causing the submenu to appear off the screen. To avoid this problem, try locating the menu at a different point in your page. In particular, avoid placing your menu within a <table align=left> tag. Placing menus within tables works just fine! However, tables which are aligned "in the gutter" so that text wraps around them (in the same manner as <img align=left>) have been shown to confuse most web browsers in one way or another, and we do not recommend inserting menus into such constructs unless you plan to test-drive them with every browser version on every operating system.

If you don't see highlighting of menu items, and you are using Internet Explorer, turn on Javascript. If you are using Netscape 4, this is normal behavior; for more information, read our note on Netscape 4 support.

If you are concerned about providing adequate navigation for users of older browsers, just make sure that you specify URLs for all of your top level menu items. All browsers will display the top level menu items; if you have provided links to pages with the same information, the user will find the experience perfectly acceptable and never know that they are missing out on menus.