Smaaz’s Blog

Dreamweaver’s Approach To Css

October 9th, 2007

Because of its ability to separate design from content, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become an extremely important technology in web development. A single CSS document can contain information regarding the position of elements on all the pages in a web site as well as style information such as font, sizes and colours. In terms of building websites, CSS definitely represents the future.

Adobe Dreamweaver has long had support for the use of CSS and has responded to the growing importance of this pivotal technology. Dreamweaver’s implementation of CSS is all the more important since many of the people using the program are not specialist web developers and rely on Dreamweaver to guide them through the maze of technologies which drive web pages.

Dreamweaver CS3 is the first version of the program which assumes that the user will want to use CSS to control the layout of their web pages. To assist inexperienced and would-be web developers, each time a new page is created, the program allows the user to choose allocate a preset CSS layout to the page. There are about 30 such layouts and they come in single, double and three column varieties.

CSS page layout is based in the DIV element, an HTML container which can be used to hold an arbitrary amount of web content. The CSS rules control the appearance and positioning of DIVs on the page. Dreamweaver CS3’s preset CSS layouts create a series of DIVs containing placeholder text and basic formatting. The placeholder text, as well as the code underlying the page, both contain useful explanations of how the page has been constructed and a few tips on how to personalise them.

CSS works most efficiently when you can place all of your CSS code in one external file and link that file to each of your HTML pages. Dreamweaver CS3 still does not make it easy for inexperienced users to create CSS-based pages in this way. If the user creates ten web pages based on Dreamweaver’s preset CSS designs, each will have its own code embedded within the page itself. There is, however, a great feature for moving embedded code across to an external CSS file. You just select a series of CSS definitions, right-click and choose “Move CSS Rules” which is available in the “CSS Styles” section of the context menu.

Moving CSS code into an external file is not something a beginner would be expected to think of doing and is not something that Dreamweaver recommends to new users. So, in spite of the improvements, some familiarity with CSS is still required to get Dreamweaver to handle CSS efficiently.

It is also disappointing that Dreamweaver still automatically generates CSS styles called “style1”, etc. each time the user applies a font or colour to selected text. Surely it would be easier to simply remove these basic attributes and just let the user either apply a style to the selection or, if no styles exist, create a new one. Perhaps this will be introduced in the next release of this excellent program.

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.

Entry Filed under: Dreamweaver