layered image swaps??

Does anyone know how to layer image swaps? Like if I had a shoe in the middle
of my web page and a colors menu on the right, how would I layer the different
sections of the shoe like laces, upper, tread and such to be displayed
simultaneously without the image swap onclick behavior clearing the previous
selection so that I can see all parts of the shoe together in one cell? Sounds
confusing and I've been destroying my brain today trying to figure this out.

[q]Originally posted by: basecolor
Does anyone know how to layer image swaps? Like if I had a shoe in the middle
of my web page and a colors menu on the right, how would I layer the different
sections of the shoe like laces, upper, tread and such to be displayed
simultaneously without the image swap onclick behavior clearing the previous
selection so that I can see all parts of the shoe together in one cell? Sounds
confusing and I've been destroying my brain today trying to figure this out.[/q]

What you want is for your visitors to customize a shoe (or other object)? For
instance, you might have three different colors of laces and tread and two
different upper colors?

You can't layer an image swap without using some complex layers and DHTML. I
think that would get messy, plus you'd have to test it extensively in multiple
browsers, to make sure stuff lines up perfectly.

I think your two best approaches are
1) use Flash or
2) make a different image for every possible variation and then write some
custom JavaScript code to keep track of the three variables (lace, upper, and
tread) and present the new, appropriate, image whenever one of the values
changes.

But it isn't a simple image swap problem, so quit trying to destroy your
brain. :tounge;

That's the problem I've run into. I've got lines and lines of code here lol
that doesn't want to work properly. So far I've gotten as far as 8 layers deep
using <div>'s but everytime I hit the button to change another layer it wipes
the previous selection. My JS skills aren't that great so I've been in teach
myself mode for the last couple of days. So far I have ~ 270 lines of code and
thats only 2 layers...the upper and the base color. Each layer has 11 colors to
swap and with 8 layers you can imagine the mess I'm looking at. I don't have
Flash installed so I was trying to use dynamic code and JS till I ran across
Fireworks. I think I can make it work if I redo the art and use pieces of
vectors instead of rasterized .gif's

Thanks for the reply. Wish me luck.

Good luck!

I have
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Java.../dp/1565923006
/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221866572&sr=8-2 (Amazon link), which is a
really nice book for learning from. Gotta love those books where the author
isn't out of high school yet. There is a
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Java...92360X/ref=pd_
bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221866572&sr=8-1, which is probably more
up-to-date, but I haven't looked at it, so I don't know anything about it.

Anyway, it covers the use of arrays (which is what you need to track your
values) and hand-coding an image substitution. It isn't a language reference,
but is is a great teaching book.