As a 3d artist I have relied on Windows apps like Dreamweaver to setup my website presentations. But the links on the first to opensource development tools on the first page of elysiun flipped my mind in a new direction for my web development. I started to use 1st Page 2000 have looked into the Web Linux tools. I found that with a few pointers from folks on the web, I can layout code tags in a pure html editor faster than DreamWeaver.
I still slice up my graphics first in an image editor but I can be happy that after I resize my tables etc. that all of my images fit nicely into my pre-coded pages way cleaner than they did with Dreamweaver. This hand coding stuff is sickly sweet! Why do you coders hide all the fun from us point and click only folks?
I had thought that you had to be an html wiz to code everything by hand. I now really understand the html code better in many areas. And I can see a better ways to apply other more advanced html features to my workflow. Thanks for these great links guys. I know that I took the right pill this time. My new reliance on hand coding with html will make my new media development home base switch to Linux all the more wonderful. I’m starting to see the code beneath the matrix like my boy neo. Heheheh. Yeah.
I use textpad myself (is like an expanded notepad).
When you mention you cut up your images… makes me think of something… why not use css to make your image into a background image so that you don’t have to do all that slicing and dicing???
well, some of us artists are not very talented coders … and and wysiwyg editors gives an artist the power to create website without the pain of learning html. but a good designer will learn a bit of code to gain the extra edge.
sure hand coding makes smaler cleaner code
when you only have a pretty basic web page
or develloped the templates and the rest get
done by php for example.
when you have a more complex layout/interface
coding with hand is fine but getting it to work
is a lot more of work.
from my experience customers accept more bigger
code since we are not using 14 k modems anymore.
it is like when people still want to use websafe colors.
this ages are gone.
you should know about how to use html but i cannot get my
interfaces done with just hand coding as fast as when i do it
in golive. also tweaking imagine you oonly see tags all the time.
it is pretty exhausting in my opinion.
and regading tables if you want to be state of the art dro tables and
use css. use div tags in relations to each other. this builds up a lot
more of powerfull web pages which reakt perfect on window resizements.
from time to time when i have done a project i just clean up the code by hand or a tool. this is faster and cheaper for the customer.
Web design is part of what I do for a living and I have pretty much settled on Dreamweaver MX 2004 as my editor of choice. I used to use Hot Dog Pro, which was a great editor for working with the HTML and CSS directly but their app support crapped-out in a major way. I still hand code just about everything as that is what I am used to but DW has great support for cascading style sheet so my feeble brain does have to remember all of the attributes. It saves me alot of time.
I’m very near to completing my latest website. In the past I used Dreamweaver, but it can be pain in the ass sometimes. My latest weapon of choice is Fireworks4 then dreamweaver. Fireworks does all the wysiwyg plus it’s a full blown image editor.
I still hand code the Html and java script in the last stages to finalise the site.
But you forgot: it’s much cooler to code it by yourself!
Nah maybe you don’t should do it just because of that…
But I like it better, you get full knowledge of the code, and can solve problems in the layout easier.And about leanring, almost the only thing you have to read is the w3c referrence to html 4 xhtml 1.1 and css 1 (2- doesn’t work allright in all browsers yet). And to make as good webpages in dreamweaver you wil have to know quite much too, and about remembering all code, that isn’t neccecary, you can check it up in the reference when you need it!
I listen too music at high vlome right now so if you think the text above was badly written it’s probably because of that, music at high vlume tend to block my thoughts a bit.
Actually, I’m doing a lot of website stuff at the moment, and you’d be surprised how some colors out of photoshop look if they aren’t websafe.
I agree! coding sites is fun, and personally I get a kick out of making a site as clean as possible code-wise.
elysiun uses Smarty (smarty.php.net) as it’s templating engine, it’s really nice. If you’re serious about building clean and easilly extendable sites…USE IT!
It separates all your html from your php code, wich makes it very easy to change the design, without digging through the php code.
Hmmm looks nice Roel… and smart as well. But I think I’ll stick to my old style html/php textpad combo. Thing is… I don’t want to sepparate my html from my php much. Lots of times my html gets built by the php… I make a big mess usually hehe.
Like look at http://www.alienhelpdesk.com and see how that little white line runs from the selected section in the top menu to the selected page in the side menu (using css)… I’ll tell you… that’s some real messy html/php and I doubt I could have done it in any way other than straight code… but then… maybe I’m wrong
And ehr… cekuhnen I don’t really get your:
"from my experience customers accept more bigger
code since we are not using 14 k modems anymore. " statement.
Do you mean to say… it doesn’t matter whether your html is messy cause no one will ever notice anyway??? I think there’s a flaw in your thought pattern there see there actually are quite a number of people out there on different platforms with different browsers. And if you use something like dreamweaver or golive… well you get nice html, but you never really know what browser supports what function. It’s a lot safer to create in straight html.
What I think my point is is that “what you see is what you get” is all nice, but you can’t beat “what you make is what you get”…
Yeah it is impossible to hand code some very complex sliced image frameworks. Sometimes it’s more spacers than really useful code. So I am looking for ways to limit my use of complex image slicing or not use it at all and use css layouts.
BTW, does anyone know of any html output image slicing tools that generate less spacer code than Photoshop?
I have been studying different websites source code. Most still use css with tables. Some even use css with tables and image maps. I am trying to tone down my tables to only include sliced images in sparse areas. Then I will serve up any remaining images in the web layout with table groups and maybe div tags. You can use <tr>, <td> and <div> together in a table structure can’t you? Anyway I will mix as much css as I can to my regular html setups until I feel that all of my website layouts can be served up entirely with css layouts.
I love the Blender community. You can talk code with other 3d artist and no one will say how off topic it is for artist.
I was just showing a coworker how beautifully a quick photoreal Blender render fits into a web interface today. Who needs clip art when you are a Blender artist?
Thanks for that tip Goofster. I was wondering how the cool elysiun interface was put together. Smarty seems to be rather deep for my as I currently code with pure html code right now. How easy is it to impliment from my standpoint as a basic html desgner? Hehe. That seems rather obvious but
you never know…
If you want tp make layout use div not tables, tables is for presenting data that is easier seen with tables. fir example adresslists, not layout! You can do antything you can do with tables with div tags.
Since I too like coding(allthough i don’t use notepad, i use scite based on scintilla), if you got questions about something done in xhtml/css I probably can help.
i would not say that you can do everthing with div tags as well since it is not so easy to get ti working right now becuase of the excelent spport of the browsers.
otherwise many company would have dropend tables already and would only use div tags.
than go to companies like lycos etc big news papers who switched to css div tags for the layout container but fill the content in structured tables because of div tag render issues in all browsers.
as i said it is possible to get each website running on each browser but can you afford that? so in real life you have to go back one step.
