This article will be suitable for those who worked through my first article or for anyone who has already used CSS within Dreamweaver to style text and has an understanding of the CSS tools within Dreamweaver.
Tables to CSS: Taking CSS Further
In my last article for DMXZone I looked at how we could take a standard tables based layout and trim it down - using CSS for text styling and to create navigation button effects.
In this article we will look more deeply into CSS. We will discover how to take our tables based layout down to a very basic one-table structure - removing all the nesting that makes the pages harder to maintain and in complicated pages can cause accessibility problems, and we will look at some of things that CSS can do over and above simply replacing HTML attributes. We will also look at a way of creating a navigation menu without using a table - by styling an html list with CSS.
Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a trained dancer and singer, whose CV lists jobs as diverse as company choreographer for a physical theatre company to chargehand carpenter for “The Mousetrap” at St. Martin’s Theatre in London’s West End. After leaving the theatre when pregnant with her daughter, Rachel started to design sites mainly out of curiosity into how it worked. It didn’t take too long for her to figure out that her skills lay in development as opposed to design and these days she tends to leave the design to designers so she can concentrate on writing code, dismantling computers and installing Linux on anything that stays still long enough.
Rachel has worked in the industry as a webmaster, technical project manager and senior web developer but in September 2001 set up her own company ‘edgeofmyseat.com’, which provides complete web solutions and outsourced development services for design agencies and Internet start-ups who do not have in-house web developers.
As well as managing and doing much of the development on projects for edgofmyseat.com Rachel is a published author and worked as a co-author on the following titles for Glasshaus:
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX ISBN:1904151108
Fundmental Web Design and development Skills: ISBN:1904151175
Dreamweaver MX Design Projects: ISBN:1904151272
Rachel is also a member of the Web Standards Project serving on The Dreamweaver Task Force.
In her spare time Rachel studies for ‘fun’ with the Open University, does family and local history research and spends time with her 5 year old daughter and her other half, Drew McLellan.