I appreciate the response, but I'm still struggling with the concepts. What you have outlined above is what I've been trying to do all along. But it just doesn't seem to work with more than one div at a time.

Here's a more descriptive (I hope) explanation of what I am trying to accomplish:

• Create a page with seven controls
  1. Select menu with 66 books
  2. Select menu with number of chapters for book currently selected
  3. Select menu with number of verses for chapter currently selected
  4. "Previous" button to navigate back one verse
  5. "Next" button to navigate forward one verse
  6. Select menu for version comparison
  7. "Update" button to submit edited text from two textarea fields, following which all options progress to the next verse
• After any one of the seven controls is clicked/changed, update the respective fields accordingly.

The first five controls can all form part of the "top_menu" div, and any update affecting one of the first three will affect any others in its downstream, as well as affecting the textarea fields and comparison field. Any change to the comparison field should affect it only, leaving everything else unchanged. Coding this without AJAX seems doable, but the AJAX complicates things tremendously for me. I just cannot seem to wrap my mind around how to organize the functions to accomplish it in a way that the AJAX would accept.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.