Bob Vaz

Bob,

> what I cannot do, and cannot figure out how to do, is display only the
> first five lines from the file, turn the + (expansion indicator) on and
> display the rest of file when the + is clicked.

The easy way to do this would be to have the +- just change the .className
property of the table between 'ishidden' and ''. Then you can use CSS to
hide all except the first rows. Assuming you do not need support for IE 6-
you can use this:

table.ishidden tr + tr + tr + tr + tr + tr { display: none; }
...
<table class="ishidden">
<tr> ...
...

However, IE 6 sucks and does not support those CSS selectors. IE 7 also
sucks and fails to respect the + selector after the className is changed
with script. So you will have to set some class on all except the first 5
rows using your PHP, as well as a default class on the table, and set those
to not display if the table has that class.

table.ishidden tr.after5 { display: none; }
...
<table class="ishidden">
<tr> ...
<tr> ...
<tr> ...
<tr> ...
<tr> ...
<tr class="after5"> ...
<tr class="after5"> ...
...

> A secondary "nice to have" would be
> to overlay the other tables when displaying the rest of the file.

Not entirely sure I understand what you mean here, but I assume you want to
have the previously hidden rows appear on top of the rest of the document
when they appear. The way to do this would be to put the table inside a div,
and set the height of the div to a fixed value - 6em or whatever. Then when
the table rows appear and become too large for that div, they will overflow
it and extend over the rest of the page (make sure the table has a
background colour to prevent the content showing through). Note that this
will not work in IE 6-.


Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/

Bob, you will probably not receive this response, so I hope you read it here. When you send a message to me, it will help if you allow me to reply, instead of forcing me to request permission to reply. Your Webmail system's challenge mechanism is also broken. It will not display the captcha image, or play the captcha sound. So basically I cannot reply to you using email.