Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Unleashed- P10: 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 | Designing Tableless Web Pages Using AP Elements One of the biggest trends in web development is that of designing websites that don t use antiquated tables to control the structure of the site but instead rely on AP Elements and CSS positioning properties to control the layout and flow of web pages. In the next few sections you ll learn how Dreamweaver in conjunction with the div tag and a little CSS can create standards-compliant web designs. Note The term given to the process used for handling layout in CSS-based page designs is referred to as CSS-P P for positioning . Technically AP Elements in Dreamweaver use CSS-P for their positioning. In fact if you select an AP Element in the Document window you ll notice that label CSS-P Element is shown in the upper-left corner of the Property inspector. Designing AP Elements Using a Style Sheet In the previous sections of this chapter you learned how easy it was to insert AP Elements using either the Insert Layout Objects AP Div command or the Draw AP Element option available from the Layout category in the Insert bar. Although these are viable options for designing a site using AP Elements they aren t the best choice. The reason for this is simple When you use either of these methods to insert AP Elements on the page Dreamweaver automatically assigns document-wide CSS positioning properties for each AP Element. As a result the page becomes inflexible and nearly impossible to modify globally when numerous pages exist within the site. A better alternative to inserting or drawing AP Elements onto the page is to create an external style sheet which we already have for our project and define numerous ID selectors that define the various sections of the page. For instance we know our site will contain the following major sections based on the design we ve been working with up to this point Header We know we ll have a header that resides near the top of the page. The header will have a width of 100 and a height of 227 pixels.
