This book consists of 12 chapters with a total of 100 sections, each focusing on a specific technique. I am making these notes as a way of reinforcing my understanding of the various features of Dreamweaver CS3.

Now lets have a look at the techniques in Chapter Four:Creating a Web Site. Designing Pages with Absolute Placement Objects.

For me, this is the most important chapter in the book. There are two fundamentally different ways of designing a web page. One method, which emerged early in the days of web production, was when someone realized that a table with invisible borders could be used to divide a display into regions, each of which could contain different information. The second, which is consistent with the latest W3C standards for XHTML, involves the absolute placement of objects within rectangular regions. The formatting of the material within each region is then defined by means of a cascading style sheet (CSS). This separation of the content from the formatting commands is, at least initially, counter-intuitive, but it turns out that it leads to a much cleaner and more standardized approach to the underlying code that drives the display. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it much easier to modify a page once it has been created and it makes it much easier to display the same information on many different devices (e.g. computer screens, cell phones, iPods, PDAs, ...).

• Technique #30 Designing Pages with Absolute Placement Objects
  • Using Dreamweaver pulldown menus: choose Insert -> Layout Object -> AP Div and you will see a predefined rectangle that you can move and resize.
  • Using the Insert toolbar, click on the Drae AP Div icon and you will see a rectangle that you can move and resize.
  • A common layout would consist of 3 regions: a left margin, a header and a body.
  • It is not a good idea to have regions placed within regions as different browsers may display this in unpredicatable ways.
• Technique #31 Formatting AP Divs in the Property Inspector
  • Select the region and then modify the parameters in the Property Inspector.
  • This is a good way to precisely specify the coordinates (Left and Top) of the region.

 

Tags: web authoring, Dreamweaver CS3, XHTML, CSS