Dreamweaver 3 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, 1st edition
Authors: J. Tarin Towers
Venue:  (2000)

From the Book:Welcome to the Dreamweaver 3 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide! Dreamweaver is exciting software: it's simple to use and it's one of the very best WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing tools to ever come down the pike. Dreamweaver isn't just another visual HTML tool. It does do what all the best editors do: creates tables, edits frames, and switches easily from page view to HTML view. But Dreamweaver goes way beyond the other editors to allow you to create Dynamic HTML (DHTML) gadgets and pages. Dreamweaver fully supports Cascading Style Sheets (CSS-1) as well as layers and JavaScript behaviors. It even includes its own DHTML animation tool: Timelines. And a fully-fledged FTP client, complete with visual site maps, is built right in. What's New? Dreamweaver 3 introduces several new features that simplify page production. And this book includes four new chapters to keep up. The last chapter in the Dreamweaver 2 book was about setting up and managing Web sites using the Site window. I've moved coverage of how to set up a local site to the new Chapter 3. Chapter 20 includes new sitemanagement features, such as design notes and the streamlined site updating features. Dreamweaver's new features include the following: Quick Tag Editor (Chapter 4): If you'd like to be able to add, edit, or remove tags while staying in the Document window, the Quick Tag editor will be your new friend. Chapter 4 is new, too, and it's all about HTML. Clean Up Word HTML (Chapter 4): They figured out that Word always makes the same mistakes when it saves files as HTML, and they figured out how to fix them, too. Special Characters (Chapter 6):Dreamweaver now includes direct support for special characters (such as c) in the Objects palette and the Insert menu. HTML Styles (Chapter 7): Because CSS hasn't yet taken off the way experts predicted, formatting text with font tags is still what most webmasters prefer. With HTML styles, you can save sets of text properties as reusable, named styles in the HTML styles inspector. Navigation Bars (Chapter 9): Dreamweaver now offers a dialog-box level method for inserting button rollovers that can have up to four different visible states. E-mail Links (Chapter 9): A new Insert menu object is a dialog box for inserting e-mail links. New menu items for Insert > Link and Remove > Link appear there, too. Who Should Use This Book? No matter what your level of Web experience, you can use Dreamweaver and this book. I'm assuming you've used some sort of page-creation tool before, even if it's just a text editor. You should use this book if you're: An absolute beginner who wants an editor that writes great HTML. A graphic designer who's used to using document editors like Director, PageMaker, or Photoshop, but who isn't as proficient with HTML. An HTML expert who likes to hand code but wants automation of simple tasks. Frightened of Dynamic HTML. Someone who needs to learn Dreamweaver quickly. Browsers Beware I use sidebars to point out `extra" information about specific features, including HTML tricks that aren't directly supported by Dreamweaver. This sidebar is about browser wars. I've made every effort to be fair to both the powerhouse browsers, Netscape Navigator (which I usually call Navigator, or just NN) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (called MSIE, IE, or sometimes Explorer). I also point out important differences between them, which are most apparent when talking about 4.0 browsers. Browsers are like sausage: No one should have to know how they're made. I was, however, employed for Netscape at one point; for Microsoft, I wrote reviews of bars and cocktail lounges. (Full disclosures are in vogue right now) When I wrote the first edition of this book, the browser wars made it seem likely that the year 2000 would bring, if not the apocalypse, then version 6.0 of something. Navigator is still on edition 4.7, and Explorer 5.0 added Netscape-level security, more user customization, and not much else. Interestingly enough, the first version of Dreamweaver was lauded for the ease it granted Cascading Style Sheets and layers. Ironically, computer prices dropped so much that more people than ever started using 4.0 browsers-and these 4.0-only features were abandoned by a lot of designers for their clunkiness, their browser incompatibility, and their backwards noncompatibility Dreamweaver does make it easy to write 4.0 pages and save them as 4.0 code. But on a small farm in the middle of nowhere, my grandpa is surfing the Web using Windows 3.1 and a ball of twine. Import/Export Table Data (Chapter 10): Import database or spreadsheet information into a table in Dreamweaver, or export table data from Dreamweaver into a data file. Jump Menus (Chapter 12): Use a simple dialog box to insert JavaScript-driven navigation menus, with or without "Go" buttons. New Behaviors (Chapter 15): Set new content for a layer or a frame when a user performs an event. History Palette (Chapter 17): Dreamweaver now tracks your actions in the Document window, and not just for multiple Undos. In the History palette, you can redo any action, even on a different object than your initial selection. And you can save an action or set of actions as an entry in the Commands menu. Objects Support (Chapter 18): Adding custom objects to the Insert menu and the Objects palette is easier than ever. Customizable Menus (Chapter 18): By editing a single XML file, you can change the content of the menus on any palette or menu bar in Dreamweaver. Customizable Dialog Boxes (Chapter 18): You can change the appearance of most of Dreamweaver's dialog boxes. Design Notes (Chapter 20): Design notes are files that let you save comments, dates, and other, perhaps proprietary data about pages and media objects on your local site or in your workgroup's file server. Synchronize Files (Chapter 20): It's even easier now to select and Get or Put the more recent files on a local or remote site. Improved Site Updating (Chapters 3, 9, 17, and 20): Loads of features, either new or streamlined, make it easier to keep your site-and its links and objects-up-to-date. QuickStart Conventions If you've read a previous Visual QuickStart Guide, you know that this book is made up of two main components: numbered lists that take you step by step through the things you want learn, and illustrations that show you what the heck I'm talking about. I explain what needs to be explained, but I don't pontificate about the acceleration of information technology or wax dramatic about proprietary tags. Tips In every chapter, you'll find tips like these that point out something extra handy. Code in the book is setoff in code font. Sometimes you can find extra tidbits of info in the figure captions, too. But Wait, There's More on the Web Site! The companion Web site for this book contains lots and lots of links to developers' pages, handy shareware tools, and example sites, and because the page is on the Web, you don't have to type in a bunch of URLs. You'll also find online appendixes covering the image map editor, HTML preferences, and browser compatibility. I also include my own sample pages, along with some DHTML I made just for this book. (You can only see the DHTML stuff if you're using a 4.0 or later browser, but the site is open to everyone, and I made it all using Dreamweaver, naturally.) Visit http://www.peachpit.com/vqs/dreamweaver and let me know what you think of the book and the Web site by e-mailing dreamweaver@tarin.com. What's in this Book Here's a quick rundown of what I cover in this book. Dreamweaver Basics In the first four chapters I introduce you to HTML and the Dreamweaver interface. If you never want to look at any HTML when you use Dreamweaver, you don't have to; on the other hand, if you want to learn HTML, there's no better way than by creating a page and looking at the code you just made. The new Chapter 3 walks you through setting up a local site, so that all of Dreamweaver's site management, linking, and updating tools will work for you. The new History palette lets you repeat or undo almost anything. Chapter 18 introduces you to customizing Dreamweaver by editing object files, menus, and other interface elements. Web Page Basics Chapters 5-7 talk about text and all the things you can do with it, and Chapter 9 describes linking in more detail than you thought possible. Chapter 8 gets you on your way with images-and Appendix A, on the Web site for this book, describes how to make client-side image maps with the image map editor. Tables, Frames, and Forms Chapters 10-12 are what most folks consider the "intermediate" range in HTML-10 is tables, 11 is frames, and 12 is forms, all of which are much easier to construct in Dreamweaver than by hand. Dynamic HTML Then we get to the Dynamic part of the book. The components of DHTML are covered in Chapters 13-16. Chapter 13 covers Cascading Style Sheets. In Chapter 14, you'll learn about layers and all that goes with them, including absolute positioning. Chapter 15 covers behaviors, a Chinese food menu way of putting together JavaScript actions-just choose one from column A and one from column B. And Chapter 16 discusses Timelines, Dreamweaver's DHTML animation tool. Site Management Chapter 17 discusses three ways of automating common tasks in Dreamweaver: libraries, templates, and history. Libraries are a sitemanagement tool, whereas you use custom objects to modify Dreamweaver's Insert functions. The template feature in Dreamweaver allows you to create versatile templates with read-only design features, and you can update the design of pages based on these templates just by updating the template file. In the new Chapter 4, you'll even learn how to edit it in its own window; or, using the Quick Tag editor, how to edit it without even looking at the code, per se. In Chapter 19, you'll learn everything you need to know about putting plug-ins and other multimedia content on your site. Appendix B on the companion Web site describes how to make your Web pages work and look the way you want them to in all kinds of browsers. And Chapter 20 is all about site management with Dreamweaver's Site window, a full-fledged FTP client. HTML is HTML Like the song, HTML remains the same, whether you construct it on a Mac or PC. Even better, Dreamweaver's Roundtrip HTML feature ensures that HTML you create outside the program will retain its formatting-although obvious errors, like unclosed tags, will be fixed. The PC version of Dreamweaver comes with HomeSite, and the Mac version comes with BBEdit. You can set up either program to work with any HTML editor you like, however. See Appendix D, on the companion Web site for this book, to find out how to set up these editors and how Dreamweaver will treat your HTML. Special to Mac Users I wrote this book on a PC, but this time around, I had a Mac on the same desk. And this time around, Dreamweaver wrote the program with a code base entirely specific to each platform. Much of the program is written in cross-platform languages like JavaScript, XML, and HTML, and the Mac version of Dreamweaver 3 was written for the Mac, not written for Windows and ported over. The main difference between the Mac and Windows flavors in previous versions of Dreamweaver was that the Mac, having only one menu bar, featured a Sites menu in the Document window. Now Windows features the same menu. The differences are negligible, as you can see in Figures 1 and 2. There are some basic platform differences that will cause the screen shots to look slightly different. Windows windows (ha ha) have a menu bar affixed to each and every window, whereas the Mac menu bar is always at the top of the screen, and it changes based on the program you choose from the Application menu (the one in the upper left of the Mac screen, next to the clock). Windows windows close by clicking on the close box on the upper right, whereas close boxes on the Mac are on the upper left. Occasionally, buttons will have different names. For instance, in some dialog boxes, the button says Browse in Windows and Choose on the Mac. They're always close enough. Keyboard conventions When I refer to key commands, I put the Windows command first and the Mac command in parentheses, like this: Press Ctrl+L (Command+L) I use this format for some other differences, too, like system fonts: The source code uses the Courier New (Courier) font face. Mouse conventions Some Mac mice have more than one button; some don't. For that matter, some folks don't really use mice at all, they have those touchpad and stylus thingies. That said, I do refer to right-clicking a lot. On a Windows machine, when you click the right rather than the left mouse button, a contextual pop-up menu appears (Figure 3). Pop-up menus, or context menus, are available in some Mac systems. To make a pop-up menu appear on a Mac, or in system 8x, try Ctrl+clicking. Your mileage may vary depending on your system configuration. Options available from pop-up menus are always available as menu bar options, too, so you'll never miss functionality in Dreamweaver even if you can't right-click. And now... on to the hook!