macromedia.com

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Check out the examples on Glish, PIE, etc.

i've tried tons of "magic columns" css guides
in real life, they failed or required too much work to have the same visual results in both firefox and ie

You can get it messed up so easily by one simple typo, and it would be hell to catch that.

i've been writing html code by hand for 10 years now. i can catch html errors easily, trust me

CMS does not exclude CSS.

did i say that?
i just said that cms-driven sites allows you to manipulate your content for other devices as easy as css

look i use css for everything but the main layout. that's what works for me. if it doesnt for someone for whatever reason i'll just have to live with his curse...

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Sn00py
chegitz, calm down man, we all have our own ways of building websites.

If you were a blind person trying to listen to a website created in a nested table based layout, you wouln't be able to understand anything in the site. Our primary duty as web designers is to aid an enhance the usability and accessibility of content on websites. Anything that gets in the way of that goal is therefore contrary to our professional goals.

[FrostyBoy]

What you're saying is that we should all conform ourselves to one ideal way of creating websites.

No Chegitz, the best path to take is the one that allows anyone to take any path, not the one that seemingly has the most light at the end of the road.

This way we (as a society) can find out what our best options are as we continue the long journey of perfecting the Internet.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sn00py
What you're saying is that we should all conform ourselves to one ideal way of creating websites.

If you mean by "way" a checklist of do's and don'ts, probably.

As it was pointed out somewhere else, if Web browsers behave the way that compilers do, non-compliant websites would have vanished long ago. But no, they just have to do the opposite.

[DaShi]

No, by "way" he means "“¹".

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Sn00py
What you're saying is that we should all conform ourselves to one ideal way of creating websites.

Not so much an ideal as saying pepole should stop using the worst practices, like making websites that people with disabilities can't use. Like making websites that "weigh" multiple times what they need to. Like making websites that are a pain to maintain down the road (don't assume you're going to be the one doing the maintenence).

One way is inclusive, foward compatable, "transportable," etc. The other is not.

[MMC]

Personally, I use Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, the GIMP and SciTE, for my web design work.

Dreamweaver is great because it can point out when you've made a silly mistake with your code (such as <igm... instead of <img...). Plus it has context sensitive code highlighting (pretty colours), but SciTE also has that. The other great feature of Dreamweaver is that it's the only WYSIWYG editor I've found that properly supports XHTML, XML and CSS standards (such as using Divs over Tables).

Flash, on the other hand, is great when I don't want to worry about conformity... as long as the viewer has the latest Flash player, it doesn't matter what browser they're using, or even what OS. Plus I use Flash to design logos and graphics that just wouldn't work in other programs.

As for Fireworks, the best feature about it (which is not found in any other package, at least not natively) is the XML to GFX script. This basically takes a PNG template and an XML data file, then generates a picture for each record in the .xml file. Great for generating forum signatures, using an XML file generated from the Members table in a forum (I wrote a script to do that, so I could feed the XML into the Fireworks script).

The GIMP is great because it's free, and it can support pretty much anything Photoshop does (including plugins, most of the time). The only downside is that it's not so good as creating original pictures, as opposed to editting existing pics (but Fireworks and Flash fill the void there). Also the GIMP supports more image formats than the others put together, as well as having a built-in HTML generator (which uses Tables unfortunately, but it's still pretty cool to look at) that can turn any pic into a webpage.

SciTE is useful because like Dreamweaver it has context sensitive code highlighting (not so pretty colours though), but unlike Dreamweaver, it's not a WYSIWYG editor, it supports nearly 100 different programming languages (and the list is still growing), not just web languages. Plus it can open pretty much any file in ASCII format (and even some binary files, but not so well).

As for conforming to standards... Why do you think everyone on this site speaks English? Markos could just answer all of your questions in Greek if he wanted to. But he doesn't, in order to let everyone understand what he's saying (Well, 90% of the time. The other 10%... it's all Greek to me ).

My biggest problem with website design is getting them finished, but that's because I'm too stubborn to cheat (use the WYSIWYG editor in Dreamweaver) and too lazy to spend any decent amount of time coding.

But when I do get things done... Let's just say I have yet to listen to a single complaint (Ten points is you know where that's a quote from).

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by MMC
The GIMP is great because it's free, and it can support pretty much anything Photoshop does (including plugins, most of the time). The only downside is that it's not so good as creating original pictures, as opposed to editting existing pics (but Fireworks and Flash fill the void there). Also the GIMP supports more image formats than the others put together, as well as having a built-in HTML generator (which uses Tables unfortunately, but it's still pretty cool to look at) that can turn any pic into a webpage.

The best feature of GIMP, as far as Web uses are concerned, is when you pick a colour it also shows you the hex (#) value for it.