How To Create Drop Down Definitions

Question

I want my visitors to be able to click on a word and have the
definition appear either in a little box or or next to the word.
I notice in Dreamweaver CS3 on the Text tab, there are three
buttons associated to definitions (dl, dt, dd). I can't find
anything in the help about these buttons. Are these the buttons I
need to use to do what I want? If so, how do I use them. if not,
how do I set up the page to allow for these definitions to be part
of my page?
Any direction would be great!

Answer 1

Hi Geeky Girl,
The DL tag defines a defintion list, which contains a term
(DT) and its
definition (DT). These are content tags, and are displayed in
a certain
fashion and can be altered using CSS. They appear in the
document as a
separate element, and are not normally used within a text
flow to do what
you describe.
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_dl.asp
What you seem to be looking for is a way to include a
definition in a popup
when the user hovers or clicks on a word, which is an
entirely different
thing. XHTML provides two tags for mouseover events, ABBR and
ACRONYM which
have the behavior that you are looking for, although
syntactically speaking,
a definition is neither an abbreviation nor an acronym. I
won't tell if you
don't. ;-)
<acronym title="Hyper Text Mark-up
Language">HTML</acronym> or
<abbr title="Hyper Text Mark-up Language"
class="some_CSS_class">HTML</abbr>
If you want to get a little fancier, you can create a popup
box using
javascript and the onclick event. Wrap the text in a SPAN tag
and add an
onclick event to call your javascript. You can use a range of
popup options
from simple messages
http://www.w3schools.com/JS/js_popup.asp
to full-blown windows.
http://www.blazonry.com/javascript/windows.php
If this is not what you are looking for, let me know.
HTH
Steve
"GeekyGirl406" <[email protected]> wrote in
message
news:g5vvca$qih$[email protected]..
>I want my visitors to be able to click on a word and have
the definition
>appear
> either in a little box or or next to the word.
>
> I notice in Dreamweaver CS3 on the Text tab, there are
three buttons
> associated to definitions (dl, dt, dd). I can't find
anything in the help
> about these buttons. Are these the buttons I need to use
to do what I
> want? If
> so, how do I use them. if not, how do I set up the page
to allow for
> these
> definitions to be part of my page?
>
> Any direction would be great!
>
>