Working with Interchange config files between Homesite and Dreamweaver.
Posted by jerothe in 
It has been a long couple of days. The first interchange site I built, I modified the config file and the graphic, a little bit of the base design, and that was all. It was challenging for the first time, but I could go back and do it without batting an eye now.
However, I have now been thrown right into the flurry, trying to build a complex interchange ecommerce site, that I designed, as the first project I did at Esystems. I am finding out all sorts of little nuances.
Here is a little tip. I am working with Homesite, Dreamweaver, and the Interchange mess of an interface to develop the site. Your config file is essentially your style sheet for the site on steroids. It has some variable declarations and other things.
If you start are going to try to edit files in Dreamweaver, the only ones you will be able to are the .html files. You will not be able to edit any of the components, template files, or config files without using Notepad, or by using my preferred program, a scaled down Dreamweaver known as Homesite.
But even if you write some code, and then past it into Homesite, for those mentioned files above, they will mess up interchange and won’t work, in the most basic sense. This is mainly because the “breaks” in characters are read differently from a Linux(the server for your Interchange site most likely) and Windows. But you can fix this.
In order to change the type of character breaks, go into Dreamweaver and choose the Edit menu.
From the Edit menu > Preferences.
Code Format > Line Break Type
Change this from CR LF(Windows) to LF(Unix). Save this and close out your preferences.
This will solve some of the problems you may have when you apply a change in Interchange, and it reads from it’s cached tmp file instead, because you have corrupted the file with incorrect line breaks.
How do I preview what my work is going to look like?
When you open a file, and you click on the browse tab in the main window for editing your file, you will set a cross hairs with arrows in every director.
If you hover your mouse over this button, it says, “Browser Size”. You can then select either 800 x 600 or a less useful, 640 x 640 to see what your webpage will look like without having to do an F12 in Dreamweaver, saving you a step.
Why doesn't IE support PNG transparency?
With the release of Service Pack 2 for Windows, everyone is now looking forward to the release of Longhorn possibly in 2005. More importantly, designers are waiting for the Internet Explorer version 7.0, hoping that it has a shimmer of hope for support of PNG transparency.
At the end of last week, the senior programmer I was working with on developing an online interface pointed something out to me. We had used .PNG transparency in one of our images, because the transparency is much better, with such a higher color gamut than .gif images 256 colors. We weren’t sure if this was because of Service Pack 2 or not.
But he had noticed that the images, which had worked fine before, were now showing up, in a different iteration of the interface, with a grey blue background where the transparency should be. It just so happened that I just read an article on the subject of IE’s support, where there are no problems in Mozilla or Opera, and found the workaround unbelievable.
What you need to do is set an IE only style in the containing cell, or block element, or wherever the image is located. What you need to do is use an ActiveX control to display the PNG transparency. Type this in;
filter:progidDXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src=’something.png’);
Obviously, where (src=’something.png’) is the relative, or absolute you choose, path to the image. Like a background image, you won’t be able to just click on it, it acts like a background. The image can’t be located in the cell, so make sure if you already tried to insert it, you remove that HTML markup to prevent a duplicate without transparency on top of the ActiveX version.
If you use the cues in Dreamweaver to write your styles, filter will not come up right under float, so you just need to type this in and trust that it will work. If you would like additional information, just do a search on ActiveX controls on the internet.
Use Windows XP Service Pack 2 to stop spam email.
Service Pack 2. I am sure most of my readers won’t know what this is, but it has had it’s share of media coverage online and off. Service Pack 2 is the Windows Update release that came out late last month that is a serious security overhaul of Microsoft’s Windows XP.
I was reading an article on the update and found out something I did not know. Microsoft Outlook will block pictures from your email unless you expressly permit them. This helps prevent any of that unwanted crap show up on your screen, but it also keeps your email from being validated. So, all you have to do is look at the email, and by you accessing the absolute links to the images in the email, the sender knows the address works and continues to send you junk.
Either way, a nice little preventative measure.
Columned layouts is a shortfall of CSS websites.
As I promised for objective view on CSS layout, I have found that doing a columned layout that involves three or more columns, is extremely difficult to pull off using CSS. I have found on most CSS sites, they just use a table, because tables were designed to contain tabular data, just the purpose for columns.
In order to archive a four column layout using CSS, you would need to have two container div blocks, one floated to the right and to the left. Then, inside one of the blocks, you would need two more blocks, again floated to the right and left. This is three columns. Finally, add two more blocks inside one of the blocks you just floated, and float one of those to each direction, left and right.
Extremely, difficult, and I have not actually tried it. But I think it would be difficult to manage, and it may be better to just use a table, hoping that the CSS3 spec will correct some of those problems in the coming years.
Columned layouts is a shortfall of CSS websites.
As I promised for objective view on CSS layout, I have found that doing a columned layout that involves three or more columns, is extremely difficult to pull off using CSS. I have found on most CSS sites, they just use a table, because tables were designed to contain tabular data, just the purpose for columns.
In order to archive a four column layout using CSS, you would need to have two container div blocks, one floated to the right and to the left. Then, inside one of the blocks, you would need two more blocks, again floated to the right and left. This is three columns. Finally, add two more blocks inside one of the blocks you just floated, and float one of those to each direction, left and right.
Extremely, difficult, and I have not actually tried it. But I think it would be difficult to manage, and it may be better to just use a table, hoping that the CSS3 spec will correct some of those problems in the coming years.
"Constant" – It's a Local Variable. What's That?
I feel compelled to write something today on Interchange, since I have working with it on a very regular basis.
As I was looking through one of the “include” pages in my site files, I was trying to figure out what everything means.
__CONSTANT__
This was what I was trying to figure out, what is this.
Basically, this is a local variable.
When in the administration interface, click on “tables”. In tables, at the bottom you will find a category called “variables”. In this section is where you set variables such as __CONSTANT__. In this case, __CONSTANT__ is set to a string value of “Red”. This is then used in multiple spots throughout the site.
What the advantage is, I am not sure. I would assume it would make for a very quick change for something very simple. But doesn’t seem like much of an advanced option in terms of design, because making a font color change, by spelling out the color is so uncommon, not to mention, not a light decision, that it doesn’t seem to fit into my design arsenal.
Netscape 7.02 Released!?
It was about 15 months ago when I heard that Netscape was going to cease production on its browser, and the Mozilla project would break off and be a separate entity. ( In basic terms) Then this past week I heard that there was a new release of Netscape.
I was blown away. As I read more, I learned that Netscape is owned by AOL, which I found weird because the AOL browser is really a version of Internet Explorer. But the browser is driven by Mozilla’s architecture, so the release isn’t anything but a version of Mozilla.
Release August 18, the browser supposedly has been support for plugins and a pop up blocker.
.XLR File Extension
.xlr,I found out today, is the extension for a Microsoft Works file.
How do I get a consistent padded border around a thumbnail image?
This is the question I have been asking for a couple of days now. I would like to have some images with padding between the image and the border. As of right now I have added white space around the actual image, which doesn’t seem like a semantic way of doing things. This is example code of what I am writing to try to get a border
div#example img{
margin:3px 3px;
padding:3px 3px;
}
For beginners, you will notice that I wrote only two values for both the margin and padding. This is shorthand. I also could have wrote,
div#example img{
margin:3px;
padding:3px;
}
Each produces the same result. The bottom example will add the same amount of pixels for each dimension. The above example you can specify one value for the top/bottom and left/right side measurements, in that order. Of course, there is always the long hand, if you want to specify different values for each.
div#example img{
margin:3px 2px 4px 1px;
padding: 3px 2px 4px 1px;
}
Margin is the space around the outside of an object in relation to other objects, and padding is the space you specify for that object.
But I have found that in Mozilla / Netscape browsers, Margin acts like Padding does in IE. But I still can’t figure out why IE doesn’t recognize padding around an image to create a spaced border, while Mozilla Netscape does the effect with the margin property.