There have been a couple of template glitches that we've been alerted to in the past few weeks. We have some easy but important fixes that should be made by anyone using the horizontal navigation with the templates.

First Update—It was brought to our attention that the dropdowns in the optional horizontal navigation menu don't always work. We narrowed the problem down to site structure. Any pages below the top level were not showing the dropdown menus. This glitch was due to the .htc file that helps IE display the dropdowns.

Here's the issue: when using a relative path to link to the .htc file from a url in an external CSS stylesheet, IE calculates the location of that file based on the page you have loaded, not the stylesheet where this declaration is included. So, what might work on a top-level page won't for second-level and deeper directories.

The fix? Once the absolute path to the .htc file is determined, use that URL with behavior:url() in the optional.css style sheet.

For example: {behavior:url(http://www.mysite.umn.edu/lib/htc/csshover2.htc);}

Second Update—A new problem made for a busy Friday afternoon today. Earlier testing didn't pick up a strange behavior in, you guessed it, IE6. When adjusting the window size of a template that uses the horizontal navigation, such as the index_2.6.4.html template, the links didn't move along with the window. So, for example, as you make the window more narrow, the links just begin to fall off the page rather than moving in as they should.

Again, it's another easy fix, thankfully. In the text.css file, add position: relative; to the body element. That's it!

As always, if you'd rather not make these changes yourself, simply download a new template file from http://www.webdepot.umn.edu/downloads.php.

And be sure to check the Template Change Log to see all the changes that have been made since the templates launched.