Tutorial/Example of how to implement "Browse A to Z" for a website

Question

I have found that simply googling this does not return what I am looking for. I am to find something simple and easy. I don't know if this requires javascript or not. I know I can "View Page Source" but I was hoping to find a tutorial. Some examples of what I am talking about can be found here:

-IBM
-Auburn
-About.com

Answer 1

Javascipt code works by running code on the viewer's computer. The pages you're linking are being dynamically generated by code that runs on the webserver itself, not in the browser. More than likely, all of those sites have some sort of database behind them.

I see from your other questions that you know C#. Microsoft provides a framework that uses C# known as ASP.NET. You can write code in C# that will run whenever someone views a page on your site (provided your site is running under IIS).

The ASP.NET Community website is a great resource if you want to find out more about that.

Other such tools that perform server-side operations would be PHP, Ruby on Rails, or Django (to name a popular few).

Answer 2

From viewing the examples you mentioned, it does not seem like there is any javascript used to make these "browse a to z" lists. (There should be a better name for them than that. I'm just going to call it a sitemap.)

I couldn't find any tutorials online that would teach expressly this type of sitemap, but figuring it out should be pretty straight-forward. (At least for implementing sitemaps like the IBM or Auburn examples. The About.com example would be more difficult as it seems that it is backed by a database or lots and lots of individual html pages.)

The trickiest part of making a sitemap page like these is using the tag, and luckily, it is way easy. Just keep checking the source of those pages you can have your own version in no time. The most time consuming part will be putting all of the links down, from A to Z.

http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html_links.asp