Posted by AGw. (Usenet) on 01/20/08 07:09

On Jan 19, 6:20 pm, Andrew H <ahods...@gmail.com> wrote:

> No I did not pay for Dreamweaver, it is on the library computers,

Cool! That means you get to use it without feeling you have to use it
to justify the cost...

> and really the only benefit I feel it has is the
> format highlighting so that I can visualize the layout in the code,
> unlike a plain text editor.

.... and as I said earlier, I think you've got just the right approach
to using it. Maybe you'll start to figure out other benefits to using
it as you progress, but either way you've got the best of both worlds
really.

Since you've mentioned visualising layout, it's perhaps worth
mentioning an important conceptual point at this early stage. HTML
and CSS are designed for the web, and not for print. What *that*
means is that you'll have no control over the *exact* layout, because
different people visiting your site will have differently-sized
monitors, will be using different browsers, will have different
operating systems, will have different screen resolutions, will have
different browser settings, and so on. As a result, you will go mad
if you ever start to think in terms of designing your site's pages
down to the nearest pixel; I'm not suggesting that this is how you
*are* thinking, but it would be a natural thing to do for a beginner.
Perhaps the way to think of it is as painting a mural: you can have
even a quite detailed design in mind, but you must keep it a bit
flexible because you have no control over the exact shape and size,
etc. of the wall that people will be seeing your mural on (and imagine
that if you carefully tailor your design to *exactly* just one
particular wall [or browser as shown on just one computer with one set
of settings], you'll then immediately have a problem when painting
that same mural on a different wall somewhere else). How you'll
achieve this sort of flexibility in practice is something that you'll
soon start to get pointers on here as you try out new things for your
site.

To put it all another way, your job as a designer is not to work out
where everything goes on the screen against an imaginary pixel-
accurate set of gridlines; rather, it's to keep the mechanics of your
code sufficiently flexible so that if (say) I need to use larger font
sizes on my computer because of poor eyesight, your design will still
"look the same" even though things on my screen won't be in *exactly*
the same place as on yours.

Hopefully that all made sense, and isn't blinding you with science at
too early a stage; it will start to make a lot more sense once you
start experimenting with more complex CSS, and people here then give
you their comments on it.

Unfortunately I'll now have to bow out from this thread, as I'm just
about to move home!

Good luck with the site... and with learning that HTML and CSS.


--
AGw.

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