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External Menu File I am in the process of tweaking an online rpg that I am creating and that requires that new members join. I have a Characters section on my left menu bar and there are some where around 80 pages that I would Have to up date to add a new character!!! Is there anyway that I could load an external html menu bar file to each page? Any Help or Links are Appreciated Uberstalke Started By Uberstalker on Aug 17, 2005 at 8:58:10 PM

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BachusII on Aug 17, 2005 at 9:06:26 PM (# 1) SSI Holophrastic on Aug 17, 2005 at 9:10:43 PM (# 2) Next time, learn to cerate web-sites before you create a big one. Jockrock on Aug 18, 2005 at 1:21:25 AM (# 3) Thread from last week on same subject http://www.siteexperts.com/forums/viewConverse.asp?d_id=17630 philcha on Aug 18, 2005 at 7:20:45 AM (# 4) This message has been edited. Your options: Frames Advantages:(a) for you, just 1 file to maintain; (b) for users, once the framed menu has loaded it stays in the browser's cache so subsequent accesses are faster. Disadvantages: bookmarking and sending the content page to a friend are difficult. In fact sending the content page to a friend requires a lot of complicated Javascript, and AFAIK only IE offers a Javascript facility which can bookmark a framed content page. In both cases you're helpless if the user disbles JS. Menu in an Iframe, content is separate pages which include the Iframe Advantages: (a) and (b) same as frames; (c) avoids disavantages of frames. Disadvantages: older browsers don't support Iframes, e.g. Netscape 4. But if you don't want to support such antiques, you're OK, just add a message between the iframe and /iframe tags which will show in browsers which don't support Iframes but will be ignored by browsers which do. SSI - but if you want to go this far then you might as well use server-side scripting (below). Server-side scripting to generate the menu from e.g. a database. You can combine this with frames or Iframes to generate the menu page. Before you commit, check out cache-control issues - you want the browser to cache the menu so pages load faster but you don't want to cache it for too long in case there are new entries. So set cache-control headers to force a complete re-read of the menu at whatever interval you think is suitable.

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