Using multiple index page "a href" links with CSS

[chuckster2]

A few years ago, I wrote an index web page to provide an html table index page for our company. The index page provides a single point of access from which an employee can select and open one of the companies policies and procedures documents. The index layout follows the chapter and topic layout of a customer requirements manual. It is a very complex index page that ended up being extremely large. The number of individual documents involved is 60 and these 60 documents are repeated at least 5 times throughout the index. So, the index has a total of 300 + index listing on it.

I now want to convert that index page to CSS to reduce its program size and speed up it operation. I have applied the "id" selector to the "td" and "th" existing table programming elements. I chose to retain the table programming, at least until I can determine how to use the "a href="#" html linking function in CSS. Each of the index listing is hot-linked to a data base server document file. If possible I would like to completely remove all of the tables programming and use only CSS, however, I cannot find a way to link to the server based files, using CSS.

Does CSS have a style sheet property that will provide the html "a href" linking capability to a web page entry and a server file? A href is the only program code that I have found that provides a hot-link capability.

 

[xWastedMindx]

To my knowledge, CSS does not allow you to use HREF in the code. CSS is for appearance modifications only.

If you need a good place to read up on CSS, visit

http://www.w3schools.com

 

[ChrisHunt]

You seem to be confused as to what CSS is for. Like Wasted says, fundamentally - CSS defines the presentation of information, (X)HTML defines the content. A link - click here to go there - is content, so it's an HTML thing not CSS.

You could use CSS to lay out your page instead of using a table. This may or may not be a good idea, but I don't think it will solve your problem, which seems to be that you have too much information crammed onto a single page.

Fix it by splitting the page up into more manageable chunks. You talk about a "chapter and topic layout", so give each chapter a page of its own and just link to the chapter pages from your index. You could also link to a page (looking like your current index) listing all entries, so that people wanting to plough through the whole list can still do so.

Beware of picking up a paper document and just plonking it onto the web - they're different media and need to be treated differently.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[chuckster2]

Thanks, Wasted and Chris, I was thinking I was trying to mix apples and oranges. I will conrinue on with my coversion to CSS...we are working on new XML programming that will replace our current html programming. This conversion that I am working is only an interim fix. But, thanks again for guiding me in the right CSS direction.