Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Unleashed- P3: The good news is Dreamweaver provides numerous windows, panels, inspectors, and toolbars for streamlining the way you build websites. The bad news, unfortunately, is that Dreamweaver provides numerous windows, panels, inspectors, and toolbars for streamlining the way you build websites. Why so many windows, panels, and so on, Dreamweaver is unprecedented in the feature set it provides, allowing developers complete control when building websites and applications | As you can see the options in the drop-down menu don t resemble point or pixel sizes instead they refer to HTML sizes. Although the default size of the page is set as an absolute value of 3 you have the option of selecting from a list of absolute or relative sizes for your page. The absolute size is a straight number from 1 through 7 with 1 being the smallest and 7 being the largest. With relative sizes you can either add to or subtract from the default font size of the page otherwise known as the base font. For example because the default font is 3 you can add to that value by choosing 1 and the type will appear as an equivalent to an absolute size 4. To demonstrate this try experimenting with the various sizes within a new blank page. As you can see from my page contained within the Assets folder shown in Figure the default font size base font is 3. However choosing the relative value of 1 displays the equivalent of the absolute value 4. The same concept holds true for the relative value -1. In this case -1 displays similar to the absolute value of 2. Figure . Use relative font sizes to scale up or down from the base font size. View full size image Sounds confusing right I wouldn t worry too much about working with fonts and sizes. Development gets easier and much more flexible after we move into Cascading Style Sheets. For now let s modify our example by highlighting the paragraphs of text not the headings and choosing an absolute value of 2. As you can see from Figure the text is changed. Figure . Change the size of text within our fictitious company s web page to an absolute value of 2. View full size image You may need to add additional line breaks before your text to prevent the text from overlapping the background image. Text Colors Yet another frustrating topic in web development is that of choosing the right colors for your website. Unlike in print publishing programs or word processing programs where you can choose from a
