Astro Lesson #30: weaving.an.untangled.web

Wondering where retrogrrl has been the last coupla weeks? And well you might as we have hardly seen her at all - not even at the last choc-o-rama fest over on Neptune (wow! was that a blast or what?)

Truth is, we had to send her down to earth for a few supplies (you know, the important stuff like pringles, diet-coke, new spaceboots) and while there, she was was taken over by the dark side. Our suspicions came to light when we found her huddled over the ship's computer late at night, using some weird kinda software... although very reluctant to show and tell, she soon gave in to our threats of making her walk the astroplank.

She was using an HTML editor!!! Horror of horrors - after all this time telling us to beware of the beasties she goes out and uses one first chance she gets! What a cheek. By golly, did we make her pay - she had to polish her own statue for a week and we refused to ever touch it again, now that she has sullied her once-good reputation. Oh, the pain, the pain ....

the.dark.side?

Here's what she had to say for herself ...

"Yes, spotty crew, I know I have extolled the inestimable virtues of HTML for ever and a day. I know I have never sullied my code with such hideous merchants of HTML trickery as Frontpage and Communicator, but today I stand proudly, albeit somewhat chagrinned, to say that I have found it! Yes, the elusive web editor that DOES NOT MESS WITH THE CODE. Well, not much anyway.

'It's a dream', I hear you mutter in the darkness, 'She's finally lost her marbles (what's left!)'

No, no little minions, not a dream, but DREAMWEAVER. This gem, produced by Macromedia, is a cinch to use. Don't get me wrong. I will never sway from the belief that actually knowing HTML - what it is, what the tags are and how it works, will always give you greater power over the forces of the universe, life and beyond.

No software is yet to get it 'just right'. However, Dreamweaver allows one to more or less work in a WYSIWIG mode - what you see while using DW is pretty close to what you get in a browser. And so it is really a design and production tool"

jump.to.hyperspace

"The true benefits of this are in its time-saving capacity (good if you are working on a commercial or large site) - why mess around with creating tables by hand when all it takes is the click of a button with DW, and all with very little extra code being dumped into your lovely pages. No messing with your original code either - you can simply drop a page you have already created right in there and nothing's gonna get upset. (In fact, DW will politely point out any 'mistakes' - open or missing tags - you might have made ... it's quite useful to run some of your older pages through it and see that what you thought was perfect ain't quite so).

Secondary benefits include :

• Increased freedom to design as the page lays itself out in front of your beady little eyes
• Better site maintaining abilities - specially if you are working on the same site with a buddy. DW has a check in/check out feature so that no two people can edit the same page at the same time - cool!
• Less likely to miss those fiddly tags like vspace, hspace, alt and alignment as they are all ready to be filled in via popup property windows
• A spellcheck feature - by golly, you miss that in crusty old notepad don'tcha?
• Enhanced support for plugins
• Fully CSS compatible
• Link checker
• Browser preview
• Template facility
• Rulers and grids
• An HTML clean up feature (be careful with that one kiddies, it can do things stanger than fiction)
• You name it.

  Combine this with a working knowledge of HTML and a hardcore editor and you are moonwalking! So, why bother with the code if the dang thing does so much for you? Weellllll .... "

  
  use.the.source.luke
  
  The folk at Macromedia are honest enough to admit that DW will not be the committed webperson's complete solution (and shouldn't they all be committed? Hmmm?) and so provide the means to open an external editor from within the program itself - whether that be trusty true-blue notepad, or something more extreme like Homesite (which by the way comes bundled with the latest release of DW - or BBedit for those from planet Mac).

Although DW's HTML is mighty sensible, there is always the option of jumping right in after all the work is done and removing extra font tags etc here and there if you are concerned about fast and furious download times - It might be worth it if you have extra heavy graphics on the page and want to pare it down to a minimum - don't forget that HTML itself adds to file sizes - it ain't just the pretty pictures.

So - you NEED to know what you are doing. You need to be able to spot a bad tag on the fly and beat it into submission. You need to be able to figure out what the heck is going on when that text keeps popping up in bold and you want italics. You need to have the power to leap tall buildings in a single bound ... oh, hang on, that's Superman's job. But you get the idea - you will always be in charge if you know what the program is trying to do, you will conquer it and not vice versa."

star.trooper

Dreamweaver won't make you breakfast in bed. It won't teach you how to use the web-safe palette, neither will it ensure that your stuff works on all platforms or browsers. It won't help you decide whether to use Gifs or Jpegs. It won't help you create web-friendly images. There's an awful lot to learn and it is a mere tool of the trade. But it's a pretty darn good one.

Dreamweaver is available on a fully functional thirty day free trial - minus Homesite/BBedit, but you can keep right on using notepad for real HTML-ing. It has its own basic editor which can be useful for minor adjustments but it won't handle major fiddling.

It's built in online manual should get you through the day, but if all else fails the dreamweaver web site has lots of helpful hints and add-on facilities - yes, that's right... it's expandable to cope with new functions!

the.empire.strikes.out

So, learn HTML - at the very least understand how it works, you can always look up the various tags at www.htmlgoodies.com if you get mixed up - but at the same time don't be afraid of using the advances in technology to make life just that little bit easier. Til next time when retrogrrl continues the adventure and defeats the evil empire, or something.