Archive for July, 2004

Have you ever made up a single class just for one instance of something in an html page? Well, did you know you can set a double class?

According to the heirarchy of CSS and inheritance of properties, the second listed class always takes precedence. Add a space between the two classes.

<Td class=”blue redletters”>

Here are the properties for each of these declarations

.blue{

color:#666;

font-size:12px;

}

.redletters{

color:#777;

}

The last use of the color property, in this instance, for redletters, is the one that takes precedence. This gets around the silly usage of some <span> tags just for a single class.

As I was working on setting up a new site today, I took a look at the error checking that Dreamweaver does and found that the Marginheight, Marginwigth, Topmargin, Leftmargin properties were depreceated. Curious as to what the proper replacement should be, this is the solution.

Body{

Magin:0px;

Padding:0px;

}

The Body selector needs to have the margin and padding properties defined in it. Margin is generally for Mozilla browsers and padding for IE.

Automated Link Checker in Dreamweaver is highly underrated.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 has the capability to check links sitewide and save you the embarrassment of the dreaded 404 error page.

Under Site > Choose recreate cache.

This will recreate your local cache and make sure all of your local web files are current. Then run check for broken links sitewide, and the reports palette will spit out all of the broken links for you. It is pretty accurate, and will find a myriad things that I guarantee you’d never thought to check for.

Browsers are getting smarter and more powerful every day, thanks to Google leading the technology charge. In order to protect someone from coming to your site accidentally from a iframe page that doesn’t make sense outside of the containing page, make use of meta information.

Assuming some knowledge of how to add meta information, in your head section add this value

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />

Add this to the pages that you do not want indexed by Search engines.

After a couple of years of exporting a document out of Fireworks as an HTML page and inserting it in an HTML page where I needed it, I finally figured out a way that I have more control.

I think that most everyone probably already knows this, but if you right click on a slice you can save it individually as whatever you want to name it. Change frames to change the content on the slice, if you have set up rollovers using shared content on frames. If you need to save a handful of slices, and the export is defaulting to the wrong directory, then export a whole .html document to the location so that it remembers the correct location, later going back and deleting that document.

Getting away from bloated code and Fireworks drop in HTML

Until three months ago, I thought that Fireworks was a wonder. You could assemble a complex navigation element, slice it up and create rollovers with the links right in the Fireworks file and drop it right into an .html file in Dreamweaver.

But as I worked more and more with that, the biggest problem was that you could not adjust any of those images. Either the table would be based around numerous spacers and other finger crossing, or you could select an advanced option to have the layout created with nested tables instead of spacers, and have a nested table nightmare.

Well, to cut your code in a third, you loading time in half, and save precious bandwidth, in most cases for many horizontal bar navigation’s, the images can be laid out in one table cell.

All you have to do is draw one layout cell and put the images side by side. Once they reach the end, if you have them stacked, they will automatically return without a <br> tag and will stay positioned perfectly.

I have found this to be invaluable when you have two colored navigation elements that but up to one another where any space showing through would look bad and be a mistake.

Then, choose the Dreamweaver Behaviors Palette (Shift+F4) and add a swap image to create the rollover. It writes the exact same javascript function as it would exporting it out of Fireworks.

The last note I have, is if you exported your images our of Fireworks, they most likely will have strange file names that don’t mean anything. Do name the images so you don’t have any rollovers that don’t work, rollover the wrong image because of conflicting image names, and to make your life easier in finding the exact image in the Image Swap dialog box from the Behaviors palette.

The two biggest things that stuck in my mind about this movie, were the music which was really great, and how Jack White was in the movie because he is Renee Zellwegger’s bed partner right now. He was actually pretty good.

An opening scene that was gruesome for no reason and a love that was totally unexplained, interesting in parts but in the end, the point wasn’t deafening. Wouldn’t ever see it again is basically what it comes down to and like most acclaimed movies, no something that really stuck Cold Mountain (2004)with me.

Read about a program by chance today online called Creative House, which was bought by Microsoft in September of 2003 and is now called Expression 3.Hailed in one article as the vector program to finally displace Flash and expose it’s weak vector creation toolset, I was surprised after a 57 MB download that the program was only a vector program and not animation or timeline based at all.

With a very brief jaunt through the program, it just seemed like a more advanced controllable vector program for the illustrator in you. For those you who want to create textures and line weights, and have it be vector, then try it out. The program is very intuitive and flexible for creation of vector in every sense and knowing Microsoft’s reputation for taking a good product, making it the best, and displacing everyone else, if I was Macromedia Freehand, I would be worried. It could even give Illustrator a run for its money.