How to Use Troubleshooters.Com's Quick Navigation Main Page
Copyright (C) 2002 by Steve Litt -- Legal

In November 2002 Troubleshooters.Com replaced our old table of graphics main page with the new Quick Navigation main page.The new page is more organized and for most browsers reduces the number of clicks to get where you want to go. It's more professional and less 1996. And it loads faster and uses less bandwidth.

With most modern browsers, the new interface makes the vast majority of Troubleshooters.Com pages just a single click away. Before describing how it works, take a look at the Main page:
Screenshot of new quick navigation main page

The navigation system consists of side links and the Quick Contents Links, as shown in the preceding annotated screenshot. Find the side link that most interests you, and note that the Quick Contents Links area changes. You can then click any of the Quick Contents links to reach the associated page. Thus, you get one click access to over 70 Troubleshooters.Com pages from a clean and simple no-scroll interface (on 800x600 or finer resolution).

NOTE

All the side links are functional links, and can be clicked to move to sub-pages. Although this consumes an extra keystroke, it enables users of text browsers and Konqueror to easily use Troubleshooters.Com, and it accommodates disabled users.

Browser Dependencies

This interface was developed and tested against Netscape 4, Netscape 7, Mozilla 1.1, Galeon 1.0.3, Konqueror 2.2.2, Internet Explorer 4.0, links 0.97pre3, and lynx 2.8.5dev.3. Obviously the Quick Contents links don't work on text browsers such as links and lynx, so instead you follow the side links, which are easily accessed with the up and down arrow keys.

All the other browsers except Konqueror work as designed with regard to the Quick Contents links. An added feature is that the side links are designed to turn orange when the mouse hovers over them. Mozilla 1.1, Galeon 1.0.3, Netscape 7 and MSIE 4 implement that feature as designed, while Netscape 4 and Konqueror 2.2.2 do not change the color of the hovered browser.

The Konqueror Problem

Something about the implementation of Konqueror 2.2.2 causes it to lose track of its history when you follow a quick content link (internally, the onChange event triggers window.document.location = URL.The result is that when pressing Konqueror's back button, instead of returning to the Troubleshooters.Com main page, it returns to whatever page you were on before arriving at the T.C main page.Because this is deeply confusing while surfing, we post the following warning when the Quick Contents links are clicked from within Konqueror:
Warning when quick contents links are clicked from within Konqueror

We highly suggest you click cancel and navigate via the side links, but we do give you the option of going forward by clicking the OK button.

As new Konqueror versions emerge, we expect this problem to go away. When such versions emerge, we'll detect the versions and bypass the warning for the newer versions. If you find a Konqueror version that does not lose its back button history when following a Quick Content link, please email me.

Navigating Exclusively with Side Links

Troubleshooters.Com's Quick Contents links are impractical in several circumstances. The most obvious is when using a text browser. The Quick Contents links don't even show up in text browsers -- the Quick Contents area shows up as a blank. So for text browsers you simply traverse the side links, using arrow keys or Tab and Shift+Tab.The side links are fully functional links to sub-pages, which themselves have links to the lower level Troubleshooters.Com pages.

Perhaps your browser doesn't work correctly with the Quick Contents links. That would certainly be expected with Netscape 1, 2 and 3, as well as MSIE 1, 2 and 3. It's also true of Konqueror, at least up to and including version 2.2.2. If you have a browser that doesn't work with the Quick Contents links, you can simply click the side links in order to navigate to sub-pages with links to the lower level Troubleshooters.Com pages.

If the Main Page Doesn't Work

If the new Troubleshooters.Com main page doesn't work on your browser, please go to our plain html main page.