Category: Dreamweaver

Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver

I presented a program to the New Mexico Macromedia Users Group this week. The presentation is available now: Achieve Accessibility with Dreamweaver. A couple of points to keep in mind regarding the presentation: some of the demo pages were done in Dreamweaver and showed how to code something. The speaker’s notes are not shown. I’m toying with the idea of adding the speaker’s notes to the presentation, but it is fairly complete as is.

At some point in the future, this presentation may be published at Wise-Women with some revisions for their format, but you can have a go at it right now. Permission is granted to print for classroom use.

Are you teaching your students to avoid these sins?

Molly Holzschlag has an article on InformIT, Seven Deadly Markup Sins that is a great reality check for instructors to use to make sure that students know how to make their tools do what needs to be done for standards-based markup.

If you don’t know how to modify the default HTML document that Dreamweaver creates see this tip Modify Dreamweaver’s default HTML New Document. It is about an older version of Dreamweaver but still applies to Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Hey, Adobe and Macromedia, listen up!

People who have learned to lay out Web pages graphically using Fireworks or Image Ready can export HTML containing sliced images poured into a tables-based layout. For years, students have been taught how to wrangle Fireworks and Image Ready into creating good rollovers, layouts, and optimized images in order to create beautiful and functional Web pages.

Some of those students are now wanting ways to use their knowledge of Fireworks and Image Ready graphical layouts to generate HTML using CSS-based layouts. How about it, Adobe and Macromedia? Can you give a demanding public updated tools that generate HTML and/or CSS fit for a world in which CSS is becoming the standard for layout?

New Tutorial and New Dreamweaver Extension

Projectseven.com: Tutorials: PVII Write Styles is a free tutorial and extension that “allows you to write a style sheet dynamically – before your page content loads.”

Project Seven says, “This tutorial will show you how to take a popup Layer controlled by Dreamweaver’s default Show-Hide Layers behavior and make the contents of the Layer accessible to all browsing devices by using the PVII WriteStyles Command to style it dynamically.”

Tip: Rebuild Dreamweaver’s Cache When Library Items Don’t Refresh

Updating a library item in a large site may not result in the pages where the library item resides being updated, even though Dreamweaver says it is updating pages. One suggestion for dealing with this problem is to use the Site Menu to Recreate the site cache.