Hi Old Hippie,
I'm going to try to answer your questions inline interspersed with the text
you originally posted;
--
Chris Leeds,
Microsoft MVP-FrontPage
ContentSeed: great tool for web masters,
a fantastic convenience for site owners.
http://contentseed.com/
--
Nat said:
This thread relates to an issue I am wrestling with at the moment. I am
venturing into web design for the first time and I have done a lot of reading
etc. on the topic and have been playing with the process. I have FrontPage
2003 available and it seems so neat and clean and the results (on IE) look
pretty good.
consider yourself lucky to have that version one of the most powerful and
useful features is the "split view". I think, as a new developer, you ought
to keep that view open as much as possible. you'll be able to see what's
happening with the source code as you make changes in the "design view" pane
below.
However, I am also aware that the appearance on another browser
system may completely distort the structure as it appears in FrontPage (and
IE).
Well, that's not necessarily true. If you stay away from absolute
positioning of elements and using "Vector" graphics such as word art, and
the like you should be pretty OK. even the best sites will look slightly
different in various browsers. you'll find the functions under File/
Preview/ .... helpful to pop your page up in various browsers you have
loaded on your system.
It has been suggested by some of the books I've read that a designer
should build from scratch, e.g. in Notepad or some other appropriate
software, and use Cascading Style Sheets.
While I completely advocate the use of style sheets (a great book is html
utopia from
www.sitepoint.com), in my opinion, using notepad is a very bad
piece of advice. sure i use a plain text editor here and there, for
specific things but in general it's just not feasable to use notepad to
create websites. it's too slow and you'd have to be an absolute expert in
HTML code to be able to write a deeply nested complicated table with
graphics and whatnot in notepad. it's just bad advice.
The book says that building the
source code in this fashion will eliminate the problems inherent in "browser
distortion."
it won't. not pad is just a text editor and whatever you type on it will be
rendered however it'll be rendered. it's bad advice.
The questions I have are: 1) Does FrontPage 2003 still suffer
from "browser distortion"?
Not if you follow the above warnings. ;-)
2) Does using a "ground up" approach to HTML code
and CSS actually solve this "distortion" problem?
No, mistakes are mistakes regardless of whether a software program makes
them or you make them yourself in notepad. one thing to think about;
who do you think is going to make more mistakes; a new developer
ham-handedly struggling to write pages in notepad, or the room full of
highly skilled programmers that microsoft employs to make Frontpage, or that
Macromedia employs to make DreamWeaver??
I am loath to get into all
of the additional work in designing using only source code, but may be
willing if the results are of high quality.
not worth it. stick with frontpage, learn a little style sheet stuff and
test frequently (as your building).
HTH
fact, FrontPage 2003 allows you to target specific browser or screen
resolutions, or see how your site will look in various combinations of
browsers and resolutions-including simultaneous previewing of multiple
browsersdiscovered that the same site looks scrambled when viewing with Netscape
Navigator. I can't imagine what it will look like with AOL or on a Mac.have any internal fixes for this problem? And why would this happen?
Shouldn't html pages view the same in any browser? I don't get it! All I
know is that my site is useless unless viewed with IE on a PC.
