Fri May 19, 2006
Greg Rewis as TodCon8: Making the Move to CSS in Dreamweaver
Greg Rewis, Adobe evangelist for Dreamweaver is giving a presentation on CSS layouts in Dreamweaver 8. Some salient points:
Doing a little live blogging this morning as Derek Featherstone is giving a presentation on user experience as the keynote to this year's edition of The Other Dreamweaver Conference (aka TodCon).
CSS has suffered from a slow adoption rate for a number of reasons:
Limited and varying browser support
Limted tools for development
Implementation still varies, but the differences are relatively slight and are getting better...
In the Dreamweaver world, strong CSS support first appeared in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and have been greatly improved in Dreamweaver 8.
So what are the benefits to coding in CSS? Here's Greg's take on why CSS Positioning is so important:
1. Designs becme easier to manage through the elimination of inline tags such as and the ability to make site-wide changes.
2. Pages render more quickly using CSS-P through the elimination of nested table tags. As Greg points our, browsers render the most deeply nested tables first, and then works up towards the upper level table.
3. Page designs can be established for printing and for various digital devices.
Greg says that the key to successfully designing with CSS is to DIVide (his emphasis) up your page at the very beginning of the design process. The
Of course, only a single
In addition to floating,
The CSS box model of positioning requires the use of "New Math" for positioning elements. CSS-P requires a new way of looking at sidths and heights. While it's simple enough to define a
Greg talks about the method he uses for laying out a page early in the design process--literally tossing all the elements he expects to have in the page in the order that he wants them to appear in the markup. The idea here is to get an idea of the flow of his document so he can insure that everything that needs to be accounted for in his design is in place, even before the first styling or positioning rule is created.
So, what type of positioning technique is best, absolute or float? Greg says that it's not either or, but more frequently and. Here's his take:
Absolute positioned elements do not have an effect on other elements on the page. They should be used in instances where you are certain of the amount of content that the element will contains, such as images and boilerplate text that doesn't chante, as you might find in a footer.
Floats are aware of the size and amount of content in the other
(What's the scariest moment in a web developer's life? The moment he or she opens a blank page.)
Greg is running through some of real-world examples of how he does design and layout work in Dreamweaver. In this example he begins by inserting a new
Nice tip from Greg--he advocates using ID's for any rule that determines placement on the pae, and creates class rules for anything involving styling. I like that idea a lot!
Great session, so I had to stop typing to listen as Greg demo-ed how he creates and positions elements on the page, with lots of great examples of how he thinks through the design and layout process.
This was a great session, since the focus was on real-world uses of the visual design environment of Dreamweaver as it applies to the complicated world of CSS positioning.
Derek Featherstone at TodCon8
Derek is starting out with something a little different from what I've seen in other conferences, particularly keynote speeches. Instead of pontificating on his particular area of expertise Derek has been taking the pulse of the room, finding out who we are and why we're here and what brings us together.
Derek's speciality happens to be accessibility. He is speaking to the current view of accessibility, that it's all about hitting the requirements that are imposed by law or by an organization. Too often, however, accessibility comes into play *after* a web project is completed as if it is a plug-in that can be strapped onto an existing site. In this model "sites and applications are tested and then repaired to accessible."
Worse, "accessibility is seen as a barrier to getting things done. It causes timelines to slip and frustrates developers."
Using a real-world example, Derek illustrated how easy it is to design a form that, on first blush, seems to be more useable to the site visitor. But on the accessibility side, that same well-intentioned design can have a profound effect on how someone with a disability might be able to access a site. He also pointed out how a form might not break any rules of accessibility, but still be un-useable to a non-sighted person.
In another real-world example, Derek demonstrated how form labels can be modified to include additional information for screen readers.
In wrapping things up, Derek recommends that accessibility has to move beyond simple checklists to a process that tests the user experience early in the design phase and all the way through. In his vision of the future of accessibility sites will go beyond Pass/Fail, but focus on how the user is interacting with a site or an appication. Accessibility becomes a people issue, not just a checklist for compliance when you "look at accessibility as part of a person's experience using a site or application" and not just another hoop to jump through on your way to meeting a set of requirements.
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