|
A Classic Now For The Future
I am always happy when I come across a book I immediately recognize as a classic of its type. Classics in any genre are rare, and they give pleasure simply by existing, as well as when being read. They enhance the quality of your life, and they are a joy to own. You want to keep a classic constantly with you even if you are not planning on reading it that particular day.
So it is with Dreamweaver 4 Magic. Al Sparber and his coauthors, many of whom are also his collaborators at Project Seven, the Dreamweaver extensions maker and design pack solutions provider, have produced a book that is an essential if you are at all interested in designing decent web site user interfaces.
What’s a user interface? The computer you are using has one —it’s the means by which you interact with it. Most computers today have graphical user interfaces—GUIs—the windows, menus, folders, documents, and desktop stand-ins you are accustomed to pointing at and clicking on every day.
Most people designing for the web are simply styling the look of web pages, individually or as a collection of them under the group name of web site. They are stylists rather than designers, as their tasks mostly consist of styling the external features of the project—the look of the buttons, the form of the elements and where they are situated.
Yet what if you began to consider the web site as a web application, and the look of the pages as an interface created for the benefit of the user, rather than as an expression of a particular design sensibility? In other words, as a GUI?
Doing so would mean you need to pay heed to well established GUI conventions that your users are already used to from their own computers. Themes, drop-down and fly-out menus, modal windows, collapsible menus and tree-view navigation: all these things are in use daily by most computer users, and they can instantly identify what they are for when spotted in an interface.
A number of sites have already tried to implement one or more of these elements, but to varying degrees of success. Sometimes the way they have been designed is downright repulsive, and mostly they are programmed so they work in one or two browsers but fall apart in all the rest.
Al Sparber and crew have achieved what was hitherto thought to be impossible, and their interface elements work in a wide range of browsers—Internet Explorer 4 and 5 for Mac and Windows, Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows, Netscape Navigator 4.08 to 4.76 for Windows, Navigator 4.5 for Mac, Netscape 6 for Mac and Windows, and Opera 5.01.
The way they did it was through a set of carefully constructed Dreamweaver extensions, some of which are available at the Macromedia Dreamweaver Extensions Exchange, but all of which are on the book’s CD. Also on the CD are all the assets needed to build the book’s examples, and the finished projects themselves.
I can personally attest to the difficulty of getting such mundane interface objects as drop-down menus to work correctly in the maximum number of browsers. I was inspired to use drop-downs in a project after having seen it in use at the Computer Arts magazine web site.
The developer of that site reckoned it would not be too hard to get it to work on more browsers than just Internet Explorer for Windows, so I put the assignment in front of a number of highly recommended web programmers, who also reckoned it would be a trivial job. All were defeated by it. Hundreds of dollars wasted. I built the drop-downs in the end, with the aid of this book.
Not just yet another Dreamweaver book, Dreamweaver 4 Magic is already a classic, and quite unique in the way it provides tutorials for interfaces you will want to use in your own projects, and the extensions needed to build them. It teaches you in a clear and concise manner, aided by plenty of screenshots and step-by-step walkthroughs.
The Book:
The Chapters:
- Using Cascading Style Sheets to Make Selectable Themes
- Building a DHTML Drop-down Menu
- Building a DHTML Flyout Menu
- Using CSS to Make Navigation Images
- Creating an HTML Frames-Based Interface <;/li>
- Creating a Clickable DHTML Tabbed Interface
- Constructing a DHTML Collapsible Layer Menu
- Simulating Tree-View Navigation
- Scrolling a Layer with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Some DHTML AniMagic
- Putting a Presentation into Motion
- Creating Simple and Disjoint Rollovers
- Taking Control with Templates and Library Objects
|
