Dreamweaver MX 2004 Tutorial COMM/CISS 271
Advanced Web Design
Fall 2008 – Class Session #3
Instructor: C. M. Sturgeon
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Table of Contents Introduction to DHTML ................................................................................................................................. 2 DHTML Menus in Dreamweaver ................................................................................................................... 2 DHTML Work Files..................................................................................................................................... 2 File organizing ............................................................................................................................................... 3 Creating the Drop Downs.............................................................................................................................. 3 Your Code ...................................................................................................................................................... 4 JavaScript Behaviors ..................................................................................................................................... 6
Introduction to DHTML DHTML has been around for many years and used in a variety of manners in successful organization sites. Dreamweaver, being the powerful web page tool that it is, offers a number of “pre-make” options. Here we will use some of those tools to make a dropdown menu within a given site. Dreamweaver does contain sophisticated functions used to create professional quality web sites. Because of this, it is one of the most popular web authoring tools among web designers. This handout is to help everyone on each team understand the steps and have a references in order to be empowered for designing within whatever site you are working. The handout is divided into several sections with a header dividing them.
DHTML Menus in Dreamweaver There are several different ways a DHTML Drop Down Menus can be deployed. Some scripts create the submenus on-the-fly i.e. the submenus are not present on the page as HTML elements but are usually written by "document.write" statements. Since search engines cannot read javascripts, such submenus are not “spidered” by search engines and screen readers. The solution is to build your own DHTML Menus making sure that the submenus are proper HTML elements within your document and they are only shown and hidden by main menu triggers. Dreamweaver MX 2004 provides us with the necessary tools to build such menus.
DHTML Work Files To start the tutorial, download the PopEm.zip file from ANGEL under “Assignments” which contains files needed for completing this tutorial. For learning purposes, it is the philosophy of this teacher “Sturgeon” – to require each individual to work through the
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tutorial, and then have the team to work together to place a completed, functioning site with DHTML, on the web as a way to demonstrate understanding and competency.
File organizing
Create a new folder in your already “defined” site PopEm Unzip the PopEm.zip archive and place its contents in the PopEm folder you created in the previous step Open the file popem.htm
Creating the Drop Downs The first step is to open the popem.htm file. The file popem.htm is a basic HTML document with the following divs: (if you are not sure what a div is yet, you may ask a team member – this will be covered when we get into the CSS components and XHTML of designing.
#header #menu #content #footer
The div #menu consists of three buttons. In this tutorial we will create a drop down for Button 2. Switch to code or split view and position your cursor at the end of menu #div and start of #content div. Insert a layer as shown below.
Switch back to design view.Open the Layers Panel (F2) and change the name of the layer from "Layer1" to "SubMenu2" as shown below. With the layer selected, modify the Left(L), Top(T) and Width(W) as shown below. Make sure H is empty.
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Inside the newly created Layer type out your submenu links as shown below. Make sure that there are no separating
tags between the submenu links.
Your Code Your code should look like this:
In the assets folder there is a CSS file entitled “stylesraw.css” ; open the css file stylesraw.css and add the following code: .subs { font-size: 80%; background-color: #454578; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px;
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We are using a defined class subs so that additional submenu layers can share the same class. Save and css file and close it.
Select the div #SubMenu2 in your Dreamweaver status bar and set its class to subs as shown above. Switchback to code view and position your cursor just before
