Text, Pictures, and Styles - Oh My!

Today's reading covered using CSS, placing images on a page, and styling/inserting text with Dreamweaver. Pretty basic stuff from our HTML code-by-hand page, now in a handy 'this-is-almost-Microsoft-Word' package.

CSS might be new for some people and is DEFINITELY worthwhile to use. What's awesome about it is that CSS helps to separate the form and function in a page. If HTML code is the 'engineer' of web design, CSS is its 'artist'. I love the fact that if your entire page becomes dysfunctional and won't load a stylesheet for whatever reason, a well designed page will still be very ordered and readable with the plain text when HTML and CSS are properly used in tandem. I think that seperation might help a lot of people with their web design as well - by using a stylesheet you sort of pull apart those two aspects a little bit and leave room to shift your focus between the two.

Something I didn't know from the reading was that Dreamweaver has a feature that lets you preview what your website will look like in different browsers. That's extremely handy; especially if you're developing on Windows and don't have Safari, or a Mac and don't have Internet Explorer, etc. I really liked the fact that they threw talking about that feature into the mix here. Code can get finicky across browsers for its code-ish reasons, and it's nice to be able to preview in one program the problem areas for different browsers.

I also enjoyed the little segment about image file type histories and capabilities. I had known a lot of that through experience with the files themselves, but never actually read a document that broke them down into 'this is what they are good at, and here is why'. It definitely helps to be able to read that kind of thing rather than trial-and-error, and it was interesting regardless.

Overall it might take a bit of getting used to for me to utilize Dreamweaver's widgets and not just its split view and handy 'let me finish that tag for you' features. Hopefully these next few assignments won't make my brain explode and I'll find something in the widgets that will benefit my hand-code-loving ways.

"The function of design is letting design function" — Micha Commeren