Chapter 40: Building Navigation with Behaviors

---

 Download CD Content

Overview

To really make your site sizzle, why not add interactive navigation to your pages? Fireworks and Dreamweaver bring you a totally integrated solution for building rollovers, navigation bars, and pop-up menus with a few simple clicks.

Powered by JavaScript, rollovers are graphic buttons that change their visual imagery — to indicate that the button is a clickable link — when users move their cursor over the button. Navigation bars are rollovers with a third (and sometimes fourth) graphic to indicate a selected or down state. Pop-up menus are different from rollovers or navigation bars. They use DHTML or Dynamic HTML — JavaScript combined with Cascading Style Sheets — to generate submenus that appear on demand as visitors move their mouse over or click a text or graphic link. DHTML is covered in-depth in Chapter 44, but the Show Pop-Up Menu behavior is covered here because it is an easy-to-use navigational system applied with the Behaviors panel.

The JavaScript that powers rollovers, navigation bars, and pop-up menus are functions that are native to Fireworks and Dreamweaver. This tight integration means that you can build your graphic elements in Fireworks and export them in a variety of ways for use in Dreamweaver. Or, as many developers do, you can export graphics only from Fireworks and build your navigation in Dreamweaver. However you prefer to work, both applications are maximized to make your workflow smooth and efficient.

---