Dreamweaver CS3 Intermediate

Transcript of the free preview lesson. Remaining lessons unlock with the full course.

Welcome to Dreamweaver Intermediate. My name is John Wedel, and this lesson will be working with tables. Okay, to get started, what I'd like you to do is go ahead and follow what I'm going to do. I'm going to create a new site by defining a folder. We're going to pick up from where we left off. In Dreamweaver Beginning, we had my website defined. Remember to do this, we need the Files tab open. If that's not open, you can go to Windows and choose Files, F8 on your keyboard for the shortcut. We're going to tell Dreamweaver what folder we're going to use as our new root folder. Remember, the root folder is the folder that contains all of the files for your website. And to redefine that, we click on this dropdown, and we go to Manage Sites. We're going to create a new site, and I'm going to call this Lesson 01 Tables. And I'm going to specify the local root folder by clicking on the folder icon here, and you'll navigate to your resources. In my case, it's actually located here, but we're looking for the Lesson 01 Tables folder. Go ahead and click Open, and then click Select. And after that, we're done. Click OK. And then we're done with this Manage Sites dialog. And there's only one file, one HTML file in this folder, and we're going to open that up and take a look at it. So go ahead and double click. And what we're looking at is a calendar that has actually been created using Tables. Tables are HTML specific tags that go way, way, way back in the world of HTML. And Tables are used primarily for two things, and that is for tabular style data, such as the calendar, or perhaps an Excel spreadsheet. And they are also used for layout, for laying out the graphical elements of your website. Now, Tables have largely been superseded by CSS and divs for creating modern websites, but Tables were pretty much the only game in town for years. And as such, you will still find that you come across websites that you're going to work with or elements that were actually designed using Tables, and therefore you'll still need to be able to work with them. So while they are not used from scratch to create a website very much anymore, you definitely will want to know all the ins and outs of utilizing Tables. So let's go ahead and let's take a look at what this actually looks like when we view it in a browser. Right now you're seeing a lot of dashed lines and different color highlights. So I'm going to preview this in Firefox, and this is what we get in Firefox. I'll go ahead and close this, and I'll preview it in Internet Explorer. So there's a little bit of a difference there between the way that it looks between Internet Explorer and Firefox, and that's based on the differences between the two browsers. Remember that's part of the inherent variability of the web, is that browsers oftentimes do things differently, and we're seeing this in the display differences between these two browsers. So let's close that.