Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Journal of Course Experiences- Dreamweaver CS3, Day 1

I’ve just finished reading the opening chapter of the text. I’m pretty excited to be starting another class towards my +30 (after this course, I’ll be at +12!). The chapter offered a flashback to HTML (I loved BBEdit), and an explanation of new web authoring technologies that I’ve fallen behind on.

XHTML- eXtensible HTML has taken the place of HTML. It is very similar, but has a stricter format (yay!) and follows SML syntax rules.

Roundtrip XHTML- permits the author to easily move between DW and another text editor with little to no change to the code.

XHTML:
- requires all opening tags to have a closing tag
- all element and attribute tags are in lower case
- attribute values must be contained within quotes
- empty tags should be written with a space and a slash at the end of the tag (to close)

- more structured than HTML, which allows one document to be viewed on multiple devices (browsers, cell phones, PDAs, etc) by creating different style sheets for each device.

XHTML is HTML reformatted using the syntax of XML

File naming
- no spaces
- avoid capital letters (will need to remember to use a capital letter if linking to the page)
- avoid illegal characters

CSS- Cascading Style Sheets
- used to separate the presentation of a page from its structure

Presentation- how a page looks
Structure- the meaning of the page’s content

Dreamweaver uses CS3 by default for setting page properties (background color, image, default text colors, page margins, etc.)

XML- system for customizing web content that must follow a set of specific syntax rules

DHTML- a collection of different technologies including any combination of XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, and the DOM (document object model). Combining these technologies allows the author to create more dynamic content than basic HTML
- has serious cross-platform issues, because the behind the scenes code is supported differently between browsers.
JavaScript- commonly used for creating rollovers, resizing browser windows, and checking for browser compatibility; can be access through the behaviors panel

Web Application0 web site that delivers dynamic data instead of static data that has to be updated manually (i.e. Amazon, eBay) aka- data-driven, database-driven and dynamic sites

Extending Dreamweaver
Objects, commands and behaviors are widely shared throughout the Dreamweaver community.

www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?view0sn120

www.dwfaq.com/Resources/Extensions

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