DREAMWEAVER I: Introduction to Dreamweaver

Background, concepts, and discussion

Dreamweaver is:

• A software for creating web pages.
• A "visual" or "WYSIWYG" editor, which means you can see what you are producing while you are doing it.

Other similar products include MS FrontPage; Adobe GoLive and Netscape Composer. All of these products are also WYSIWYG editors for creating web pages.

Why Dreamweaver is cool:

• It's better than hand-editing HTML code because you are less likely to make (coding) typos, you can see the effect while you work, and in many ways it is less tedious (for instance, than keying all the cells of a table). It also looks like other softwares you use in that it's a point-and-click interface, and has a handy-dandy upload-download feature that you will like.
• Compared to other similar softwares, it combines the visual editing environment with an easy option to hand-edit.
• It makes code that is clean and easy to edit by hand if you want to. It does a good job of being standards-compliant. It allows you to incorporate CSS and Java scripts.

Important Dreamweaver vocabulary:

Document window:

the main workspace in which you are creating or editing a page.

Site window:

the window from which you manage your files, select files to edit, and transfer files.

Panels:

toolbars and other similar critters you can use to insert objects and functions into your document. You can open and close these (there are several you may use regularly eventually but not today) by selecting or deselecting them from the "window" menu. In Dreamweaver MX, these appear as a Property inspector below the document window (it can be moved by dragging the five dots at the far left), and several others to the right of the primary work space. In Dreamweaver 4.0, they are free-floating toolbars.

Inspectors:

specific panels which allow you to make changes to the attributes of selected objects or text.

Important general web publishing vocabulary:

Upload:

copy a file from your personal machine to your server

Download:

copy a file from your server to your personal machine

Directory:

group of files under one name on either server or local machine

File:

any item in a directory. Can be a text file (a web page, a Word document, etc), an image file (a picture, symbol, or drawing), or any of a number of other types. Today we will use text files.

Block-level element:

any element which is intended to be a section of the page. Examples are paragraphs, blockquotes, or lists, which all start on a new line.

In-line element:

any element which is intended to display in the flow of the content and not start a new section. Examples are boldface, italics, and anchors (links)

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