We be Weavin' the Dreams

Okay so lucky for me I managed to find almost all of the pages for today's reading scattered across the internet like a treasure hunt to tide me over until I can purchase the book. Yay!

This intro was surprisingly informative in terms of some of Dreamweaver's new cool features. Granted, I hadn't put much thought into what Dreamweaver might have beyond my first open up and look around (the fluid grid excited me so much though when I saw that option but that's besides the point). It's really cool that there's an FTP contained in it, as well as all of the advanced options for collaboration and working/in-progress pages. Just reading that in the intro impressed me a bit more with Dreamweaver; they've really bulked it up beyond what I remember it as.

Overall the rest of lessons 1 and 2 explain the basics of building a webpage in Dreamweaver, which is just like building a webpage normally except...okay it's on easy mode. Dreamweaver will close your tags for you, ask you what tag you wanted, and let you preview the code before you throw it up on the Internet for everyone to laugh at your mistakes (kidding, kidding). Granted, Dreamweaver's functionality isn't all sunshine and roses (I was using it as my text editor for the web project and the live preview is in Dreamweaver units whatever that means, not actual web units, so positioning was all funky), but overall it has a good architecture for allowing you to get started and make sure you don't make a silly mistake like missing a bracket.

Plus, it's super convenient that it packages your stylesheets with your project. I don't know what it is about the reference a stylesheet code, but I ALWAYS manage to screw it up if I try to write it on my own. The fact that you only have to concern yourself with building the stylesheet allows you to focus on making the webpage great, rather than ripping your hair out over something that shouldn't be so difficult.

I also want to point out that I think the progression of this class from hand coding to Dreamweaver is definitely an important and necessary chain. Dreamweaver can definitely make your web designing simpler, but you have to know what you're doing to begin with and know that Dreamweaver should be a tool not a crutch. If it gets introduced too early on, people rely on it. I'm glad the class is structured so that learning the HTML comes before learning a tool to facilitate HTML development; and I'm excited about this next stage in our class!

"Now that we can do anything, what should we do?" - Bill Buxton