I am designing a registration page where a user selects newsletters they would like to join. There are literally hundreds they could choose. It is medical and I think I will simply structure it in a hierarchy of topic and sub topic. example: [] cancer [] lung [] stage 3 [] throat [] brain Code (markup): ... I have a two fold question really. One, because there are so many options, should I use a CSS div hide scheme. Where say the 25 main topics are displayed and if they check say cancer CSS will prompt the sub topics under cancer to appear? Is that the best way? Second question is do I hard code all these topics into the page or do something sophisticated with a database? thanks!!
This is the type of decision that is left at your discretion simply because there are always many ways to go about solving a problem. There is no "right" answer in this case. But there probably is a method that works better than others. For the design/layout, the less they see the better. So hiding sublevels of content is a wise choice. The design and placement of these is dependent on your design so I can't comment. As for the question, hard-coding would be the simplest approach, but is definitely messier. If you have enough coding expertise and the time, you can always try for the DB approach. But again, this is at your discretion.