I have been teaching Dreamweaver, among other Macromedia programs, at the Government Printing Office and Trinity University for the last five or so years. Kim's post about "friends don't let friends use fonts" really got me thinking about the evolution of my curriculum for web related classes. Macromedia has released a lot of versions of its various programs during that time, and this means I've needed to keep revising the exercises I give my students.

At some point I realized that it wasn't necessarily in my students' best interest to show them every single bell and whistle in Dreamweaver. In my enthusiasm, I would demonstrate everything from layout view to automatic table formatting to HTML Styles, whether I thought they should use that feature or not. I finally came to the conclusion that teaching a "best practice" workflow, as opposed to revealing every possibility, gave my students real concepts they could hang on to after they finished the course.

This brings me to the revolution that probably brought the biggest change to what I teach: Web standards. I now take my students through a very prescribed set of exercises that begins with basic (X)HTML, progresses through hand-coded CSS, and ends with two template pages: one a hybrid CSS table structure, and the other a CSS positioned page. To relieve some of the seriousness, I give Fireworks breaks. The kinds of graphics we make are determined by the needs of our Cascading Style Sheet, but we try to have a lot of fun with effects and creative commands.

Why am I babbling about all of this? In addition to the fact that it's one of my favorite subjects, it is also because I am very excited about the new CMX JumpStarts. These are exactly the kind of learning experience my students (and we all) need. By examining the extensively commented files, students can deconstruct the very usable two column layout and get a crash course in how to make a CSS positioned page work well in all standards compliant browsers.

And that is something smile about. Because teachers don't let students use font tags...

Well folks, today saw the release of our first CMX JumpStarts design, Paris.

Paris has been created using the CSS positioning design technique and meets the standards as laid down for xhtml 1.0 transitional and CSS 2, it also meets the accessibility specifications for 508 and WAI. With the excellent support provided in our forums this could be an ideal time for those of you looking at moving your work forward to meet this level of accessibility.

Paris provides a fantastic opportunity to move your design work on to the next level, both from a coding and an accessibility view.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on Paris, and any ideas you might have for future releases in the CMX JumpStarts series.

Clean code can make a big difference: 30 kilobytes worth of difference in my case.

I'm currently working on a project where I have to take Word documents (really, really large Word documents) and convert them into an accessible format for the web. To get them into a clean, html state, I took the following steps:

• Use Word's "save as web page" feature.
• Upload Word's htm file to Textism's Word HTML Cleaner tool to strip out all the MS junk.
• Save cleaned html to a new file.

At this point, I have clean html, but it's still not as streamlined as it could be. The original Word document was basically a series of data tables, and Word exported them as such, thankfully. But, it wrapped the content of each cell in a paragraph element. So, it looked something like this:

<tr>
<td width="12%" valign="top"><p>AADT</p></td>
<td width="43%" valign="top"><p>WEIGHTED AVERAGE TOTAL ADT</p></td>
<td width="17%" valign="top"><p>ROADLOG</p></td>
<td width="13%" valign="top"><p>NUM</p></td>
<td width="13%" valign="top"><p>59</p></td>
</tr>

While these paragraphs were not invalid, they were unnecessary and unsemantic. I wanted to get rid of them. So, I opened up Dreamweaver's Find and Replace. Under Search, I selected Specific Tag, then selected p. In the next row, I selected Inside Tag, then selected td. Under Action, I selected Strip Tag. What all this means is that Dreamweaver would look for any paragraph elements inside of td elements and strip out these tags, but not their content.

I clicked Replace All and let Dreamweaver do its work. It stripped out 2633 instances of p elements inside of td elements, so now it looked like this:

<tr>
<td width="12%" valign="top">AADT</td>
<td width="43%" valign="top">WEIGHTED AVERAGE TOTAL ADT</td>
<td width="17%" valign="top">ROADLOG</td>
<td width="13%" valign="top">NUM</td>
<td width="13%" valign="top">59</td>
</tr>

While the change doesn't look very dramatic from the markup I had before, my file size had decreased from 310 kb to 280 kb – that's a file size decrease of almost 10 percent! This is why clean code matters: removing extra, seemingly harmless tags can really add up and make big differences in file size, which in turn can make big differences in how easily your visitors can use your page, how much your client has to pay in bandwidth, and even how well your page ranks in search engines.

Next up: removing those width and valign properties. I'll let you know how many additional kilobytes I strip out.

It seems that the web design business is seasonal. At least it is in my neck of the woods I don't know about you, but traditionally, I get a lot of work coming in beginning around September of every year, lasting through January or February, and then after that it's spotty until the same time next September. Am I the only one? It's just odd... I mean it's great, because the holidays are coming up and that means some extra money to spend, but it sure would be nice to even out the feast or famine routine and make it last year 'round.

There is no explanation for this phenomenon that I've been able to find. If I knew what caused it to happen, I'd make it happen all the time. Maybe it's because companies want to ring in the new year with a new or revised website, or perhaps summer is ending and folks realize it's time to get back to work, and that means new web dev projects. I dunno, but it's confounding.

As Kasey Kasem likes to say: Ponderous, man...

Hi, I'm Big John, and I'm a webcomic addict.

I never thought this would happen to me personally. Oh, I have seen the host of webcomics available, and even read Sinfest pretty often, but all the others I ran across tended to make me recoil in horror. I thought, "Hey, newspapers ARE useful for something! They filter out all this dreck!"

Unfortunately for me, Sturgeon's Law says that "90% of everything is crud", and since there are literally thousands of webcomics, there must therefore be very many good webcomics. In other words, only the law of averages was saving me.

I have a geek's brain, and like a squirrel, that brain eventually gets into everything. I had accidentally come across one more good comic, Freefall, and I noticed that the author had a page recommending other webcomics. Piqued, I visited one. Amazing! It was actually a GOOD one! I hadn't had to search or anything!

At that point it was far, far too late for me. It seemed that every comic on that list was better than the last, and soon I discovered that some of them had their own recommends, and so I was led on and on, down that old slippery slope...

Well, you get the picture. Suddenly the real world of webcomics was revealed to me. "So what?" you say? Yeah, I said that too, but try saying that to a finger with an insane compulsion to repeatedly click the "Next" button. Fingers don't have ears.

See my problem? "Webwork time" - "Webcomic time" = "Broke loser". So what I'm asking is, where is the support group for (supposedly) recovering webcomic-aholics? Is this a need too new to have engendered a societal response? Is there any hope, or should I just stop fighting it and submit to assimilation?

Oh my aching eyeballs...

Last week I was watching an acquaintance--I won't say who to protect the innocent--when I noticed him heading into the Property Inspector in Dreamweaver to apply font sizing and styling information to a block of text. I fought my urge to lunge for the mouse, screaming "Nooooooooooo!!!!", but it was a near thing.

Now I know people get into habits when it comes to getting their work done, but in this case this is someone who should really know better, and not only know better, but should be actively working to get up to speed with what most consider to be the only appropriate way to style text--through CSS. But there they go. Creating all sorts of font tags in their documents that will do nothing but add unnecessary page weight and make revisions to the styled text throughout their site a nightmare. Trust me, I know this to be true since I have a site that needs some work in that area, but having headed down the dark, twisted path of using font tags digging in and cleaning things up now that it's too late is more work than I'm willing to do. If this were a client site it would be a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Having watched and reacted the way I did to my friend's use of font tags made me think a little harder about how web standards are being taught, and you know what? Much of the information in Dreamweaver books is just flat wrong when it comes to this topic. In the course I teach at the community college I've had to make major revisions to the steps the authors choose to cover for the simple reason that they are wrong. In last week's class, for instance, students were instructed to enter text and then told to "turn to the Property Inspector and make the text Arial, Helvetica, bold, blue, and size 4". "Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!" No, no, no,no, no. No. Stop it. No. Beyond the fact that font tags are deprecated (I do love that word, just for the way it sounds) you're making a horrible mess of things by going down that route. But chapter after chapter in the book uses the same methods, and not until Chapter 13 (!) does CSS get covered at all. Needless to say, that has made my job as the instructor a lot more complicated.

But I can't in good faith teach my students bad practices, and I'd like to say that you also have a moral obligation to your friends and co-workers to stop them from heading down the path to font tag hell. Yes, it's harsh, but sometimes you have to use some tough love. Your friends will thank you. Maybe not today, and maybe not even tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of their lives.

Once again, fingers are madly typing about a frightening OS X threat. The Opener can steal your personal information and open a back door on your computer. It might even destroy data. It was mentioned last week on Slashdot. CNet News has done an article quoting the Anti-Virus creators. Sounds scary, huh? Not.

It's a simple Bash script. A shell script. We're Unix, remember? And it has to be installed by a person with root access. There are no reports of propagation in the wild. What kind of threat is that? You would have to install it (or someone with root or physical access to your computer), type in your install password and allow it to run. Unless the new trend is for trojan/virus/worm makers to go door to door, I don't see this being a big deal.

When the malware makers create a self-installer for The Opener that auto-emails it from person to person, I might get slightly worried. And I might then compare it to current Windows problems. Any anti-virus maker that wants to create a program to protect my computer should understand this fact and mention it when being quoted in articles. Sheesh.

While working on an extension that I'm hoping will combine Dreamweaver and Flash I needed to have the user select the font that they want to use. So I used the API call dw.getSystemFontList() to grab a list of fonts to display to the user, and then dropped the list of fonts into a select list to give the user their choice of fonts.

To do this, add the ListControl class to your extension (see Fill a list with defined site names for how to do that), then add a select list to your extenion dialog, give it a name of "fontList" and then in your initilization function, add the following code:

var fonts = dw.getSystemFontList('all');
FONT_LIST = new ListControl('fontList');
FONT_LIST.setAll(fonts);
processFontChange();

Voila, instant font list. getSystemFontList() can also take 'TrueType' to list only the TrueType fonts on the user's system.

Without boring you with the sordid, horrendous details, I'll just say that my computer crashed Wednesday morning. Hard. And after spending nearly 6 hours trying to fix it myself, I took it to the local Mac repair guy (we only have one in our small town). Due to a chain of stupid events, it wasn't fixed until Friday evening. That was nearly three work days without my production machine. Can you say tic, twitch and nervous breakdown? Especially without knowing whether I was going to lose everything on it or be able to recover some.

My machine is three years old this month, but until the crash, it ran great for using Dreamweaver for code and doing light graphics. However, due to my 120MPH work speed of late, I hadn't taken time to do a good thorough back up in a couple months. Thus, I had to pay the tech more money to pull everything off and onto his hard drive before he tried to repair the disk. That could have been saved money if I didn't need to worry about the data. The good news is, I now have a new hard drive with, you guessed it, Panther installed. My old Jaguar HD is now a slave to it and I have been able to recover all my data. The bad news is that my pocketbook is WAY lighter. Ugh.

And so I turn to you, gentle reader. Do you have a favorite daily backup program? Obviously it needs to run on the Mac and I would love for it to be seamless and simple. I want to set a time of day (well, night probably), have it run on it's own, and back up to my external HD. I don't want to have to think about it. Let me know. I've got to work this out before anything else happens. The trauma was too much. :P

Adding this entry because I've seen a number of people come across this bug recently.

What happens is that when Extension Manager is starting it crashes, and says that there was an unspecified error. This is happening because of a bug in either the way Extension Manager reads in the installed extensions within Dreamweaver or in the way that it installs Dreamweaver extensions that causes the reading in of extensions to break. I've not seen this issue with non-Dreamweaver extensions, but I've seen the crashing reported when installing an extension into another product such as Flash through Extension Manager. Apparently this has been a problem since Dreamweaver MX, and continues on with Dreamweaver MX 2004 on Mac OSX as there is a TechNote on the issue: Extension manager crashes upon launch after installing extension to Dreamweaver MX 2004. If EM is crashing on you, then please give it a read.

There is change to the process described with the TechNote that I think would be good to make. I would suggest moving one MXI file at a time into the "Hidden" folder, starting with the extension that was installed most recently and moving backwards, testing EM on each move to see exactly which MXI file EM is choking on. When you find the one, then start moving back the other MXI files making sure to again see if EM crashes.

As an extension developer, I think it fair to mention that this is not the responsibility of any particular extension; this is an issue with Extension Manager itself. Reason being is that I've seen this issue reported a number of times over the past year or so, and I've yet to see the same MXI file implicated more than once.

I've finally decided to make the plunge and update my main office machine to Internet Explorer 6.0. I've been running 5.0 mostly because it is nice to have for testing some inconsistencies between IE 5 html and css rendering with other browsers. However, it seems that noone is even trying to maintain compatibility with the browser any more. Even Ebay, which should maintain a lower common denominator with browser compatibility, does not work properly with IE 5 -- I was getting popup JavaScript errors on every page. This seems odd, considering that IE 5.x is still the second most popular browser out there. . . .at least according to all the stats I've seen.

Unfortunately, I am not very impressed with Firefox, Mozilla, or any of the other browsers out there. For business use IE seems to offer the most -- copying tables and pasting them into Excel or Dreamweaver, for example. Also, it seems to load much faster. Hopefully the upgrade to 6.0 will not slow me down. There is nothing I hate worse than a slow-loading program.

Excuse me while I restart. . . .

I've been involved in several projects lately that required a set of files to be copied into a specified location within a site. DWfile.copy() is great for this, however, IMO, it has one limitation in that it won't copy a file if the destination folder is not present. Of course, it would be easy to argue that you can't copy into a folder that doesn't exist yet, but from a usibility, it's a pain to have to go through and create folders and then do the copying, especially if you're trying to copy a folder with several subfolders into a user's site.

In order to get around this limitaion, I wrote a library function that allows the user to copy an entire folder, and the script handles all the creating of the folders for me. The code for copyFolder() is below:

function copyFolder(start, end, overwrite){//1.0_DC
// Copy the folders
var theFolders = getAllFolders(start);
var theFiles = getAllFiles(start);
for(var i=0;i<theFolders.length;i++){
theFolders[i] = theFolders[i].substring(start.length);
theFolders[i] = end + theFolders[i];
if(!DWfile.exists(theFolders[i])){
DWfile.createFolder(theFolders[i]);
}
}
for (i=0; i<theFiles.length; i++){
var folderPath = theFiles[i].substring(start.length);
if(overwrite){
if(DWfile.exists(end + folderPath)){
DWfile.remove(end + folderPath);
theResult = DWfile.copy(theFiles[i], end + folderPath);
if (!theResult) alert('error on copy');
}
}
else{
if(!DWfile.exists(end + folderPath)){
theResult = DWfile.copy(theFiles[i], end + folderPath);
if (!theResult) alert('error on copy');
}
}
}
}

Note: The copyFolder function requires previously posted functions getAllFolders() and getAllFiles(). I typically use the copyFolder function in conjunction with a list of sites so I can copy somewhere within the site's root folder.

I grew up in Florida. But man, I don't remember having more than a handful of strong hurricanes. What in the world is going on down there? I still have friends all over the area and they've been through alot the last couple months. One web friend, Peb (who goes by the name MarshBunny), after repeated back to back 'canes, has turned her frustration and creativity into a really great "I survived" logo. It's on T-shirts, mugs and hats. If you're in Florida, you'll want to check it out.

My favorite part of the I survived Hurricane Season 2004 logo is the really cute frog. He looks like he's just had it... Peb says that's how she feels too! And rightly so. ;)

I just noticed that Mike and Mark have a release candidate of the sIFR technique (pronounced "siffer"). Can't wait to put it up on a couple sites. I think I'll put it here on the blog for you guys to see over the weekend (if I can find some extra time. :)

The technique grew out of Shaun Inman's IFR technique which wasn't scalable. You had to export the swf in the size you wanted it rendered in. This technique is scalable and dynamic. Shaun writes, 'IFR is just an anagram of FIR, and pays homage to Fahrner Image Replacement. And it's "Flash Replacement" instead of "Text Replacement" for the same reason, to parallel FIR.'

Read their notes and download release candidate one. If you put it on a site, leave me a note and let me know how it works out for you.

Many times you'll need to find a way to grab a list of files within a folder. Perhaps you need to find a list of all files within a site by passing in the site root file path (for how to find the site root url read: Locating root folder for a specific site). So I modified a sitewide JavaScript library function that was passed onto me by Massio Foti to be able to accomplish this. Actually becuase I was also frequently having to grab ujust a list of folders, I split it up into two functions, one that would grab all folders, and then one that used the list of folders to grab all the files winthin those folders. So here are the two functions:

//Traverse the folder passed in and return an array of all the folders within it
//Design Notes files are already filtered
function getAllFolders(theFolderURL){//1.1_DC
var dirArray = new Array();
dirArray[0] = theFolderURL;
for(var x=0;x<dirArray.length ;x="">
//Put together an array of directories
theDirs = DWfile.listFolder(dirArray[x]+'*', 'directories');
for(var i=0;i<theDirs.length ;i="">
//Filter out the Design Notes folder
if(theDirs[i] != '_notes'){
dirArray.push(dirArray[x]+theDirs[i]+'/');
}
}
}
return dirArray;
}

//Traverse the folder passed in and return an array of all the files within it
function getAllFiles(theFolderURL){ //1.1_DC
var returnFileArray = new Array();
var theDirs = getAllFolders(theFolderURL);
var theFiles = new Array();
for(var i= 0;i<theDirs.length ;i="">
theFiles = DWfile.listFolder(theDirs[i] + '/*' ,'files');
for(var k=0;k<theFiles.length ;k="">
returnFileArray.push(theDirs[i]+ theFiles[k]);
}
}
return returnFileArray;
}

Example usage grabbing the file path to the currently selected site, and then getting a list of all the files in that site.

var sitePath = site.getLocalRootURL(site.getCurrentSite());
var files = getAllFiles(sitePath);

In my last blog posting, I included a link to a tech note on the Macromedia site. Since then, they've updated the information.

If you're experiencing database connectivity problems - just in Dreamweaver, not when you view the page in a browser - Macromedia has an extension that you'll be happy with. According to the tech note, this extension fixes problems on XP SP2 boxes running ASP.NET or ASP test servers.

Read the tech note: http://www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/ts/documents/dw_xp_sp2.htm#aspnet_db (updated Sept 27, 2004).

I've got to hand it to Mike Davidson. He's putting together one of the most inventive things I've seen in quite some time. I'll be writing an article about it soon. But for now, I'll give you the basics.

Mike's developing a way to use an image replacement technique (obviously most useful for headings) using JavaScript, Flash and CSS. You simply style your headings as always using your h1, h2, h3 elements and cascade the fonts as always. The technique then uses JavaScript (if installed), and replaces whatever text you've put into the heading element with dynamic text (using Flash). This means that we can use beautiful fonts, not installed on the user's system, on our web pages. This rocks!

I've been playing around with it and so far I'm excited about the results. The method is due out of beta soon and I've already got two client sites I'll be adding it to. The thing I like best is that if the surfer's browser does not have the Flash 6 player installed or has JavaScript turned off, the text renders using the CSS and they don't feel they're missing anything. This is not only good for accessibility, but it's also wonderful for search engines. This text can be indexed and read by all. Excellent!

You can read Mike's very long explanation at Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text. And the most recent beta (check his site's blog for releases after this date) is version 2.0b2. You can download and play with the files -- sans instructions for now -- at sIFR 2.0b2: The Mo’ Betta Beta.