Togglers vs Dropdowns

[lizat]

Dear Madcaps,

Which of these should I use, they seem to do the same thing. Togglers though do take a bit of time to set up. The only difference that I can see is that with togglers I could have non-contiguous paragraphs in a toggler. Lisa recommended togglers and I have used them. Now, I've discovered dropdowns they are faster to set up but are there any drawbacks?

thank you.................... liz

[KevinDAmery]

Dropdowns have to contain all of the tags you want to expand and collapse. This can make the topic code a little unwieldy to manage if you need to make changes later. Togglers take a few more steps to set up initially but once they're built they're easier to maintain.

[wijnand]

Hello there Liz,

The Biggest difference between Togglers and Dopdowns are that Dropdowns are big paragraphs of text. Where as a toggler you can hide anywhere or reveal anywhere.

A Drop down works like this:

[Drop down]
hello
blah
blah
[/dropdown]

As you see it has to be one big list of connected parapgraphs and images. A Toggler however :

[Toggler]
Hello this is a toggler
[/Toggler]
Some text that should always appear

[toggler]
some more toggeling
[/toggler]

the idea is basically that if you need to show/reveal text over a entire page that is not centralized it makes it a lot easier with togglers instead of having to make 3 dropdowns that you have to click open you have one with a toggler but it does require a bit more work to use yes

[i-tietz]

So, you're using a toggler to mimic a dropdown? Possible.
As far as I can remember (tried togglers sometime last year) the major drawback was that you might not see what you reveal via the toggler, because the revealed content might well be outside the current help window.
That's different from dropdowns - they reveal the contents right behind the dropdwon hotspot.
I don't see any other difference beyond that.