Product Description

After listening to complaints, Microsoft has given FrontPage 2003 some pretty advanced features, including an HTML cleanup tool that helps alleviate bloated code and new support for Macromedia Flash and XML. Now, savvy Web veterans can control as much of the process as they want, and even collaborate on a site with developers who use Dreamweaver, GoLive or other Web authoring tools. Yet, unlike those other tools, FrontPage 2003 still has automated features for beginners who don't know where to start. There's still one flaw, though. Microsoft's idea of a user manual is a flimsy pamphlet. But that's easily solved. "FrontPage 2003: The Missing Manual" offers you everything from the basics to meaty sections on advanced tasks. Our book puts the program's features in context, with clear and thorough chapters that provide valuable shortcuts, workarounds, and just plain common sense, no matter where you weigh in on the technical scale. With it, you can learn to build simple Web pages, or sophisticated ones with tables and Cascading Style Sheets, and find out how to manage and publish a Web site. You'll also learn to create forms, work with databases, and integrate FrontPage with Microsoft Office. If you haven't worked with Web pages before, each chapter provides "Up to Speed" sidebars with useful background information. If you do have experience, the "Power Users' Clinic" sidebars offer advanced tips and insights. You won't find tips like those in the pamphlet, or even in the Help file. "FrontPage: The Missing Manual" gives you the complete lowdown on the program above and beyond any book on the market.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #459559 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 411 pages

From the Publisher
Ready for a web site of your own? Microsoft FrontPage 2003 has everything you need. Your geek friends might howl if you use it, but FrontPage now has advanced features, including support for Flash and XML. Our Missing Manual gives you the best view of the program, along with plenty of shortcuts, workarounds, and plain common sense. You won't find information like that even in the Help file.

About the Author
Jessica Mantaro is an accomplished technical writer who has worked as an instructor, training professionals to use Microsoft Frontpage and also as a creator and editor of Web pages. She is now a freelance writer living in New England. Prior to all that, she spent time in New York's art world, where she toiled to boost technical savvy among the old-fashioned and inexperiened.

Excerpted from FrontPage 2003 the Missing Manual by Jessica Mantaro. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 7 Cascading Style Sheets

When HTML receives its lifetime achievement award from the World Wide Web Academy, it surely won ’t be for the gorgeous documents it helped produce. As you learned in Chapter 2,HTML ’s layout capabilities are pretty limited. So now that you understand basic HTML formatting, you ’re probably wondering how some Web sites manage to look so sleek.

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, have advanced the cause of Web design enormously. With CSS, an author gains greater control over what each page looks like. Style sheets contain specific typographic and color controls to improve your site’s appearance, and most of these CSS tools surpass regular HTML formatting capabilities. But styles go beyond controlling text and color. You can also use styles to do things like precisely position images and add margin and alignment settings to page elements. Best of all, you can apply style sheets to many pages at once. By implementing site-wide changes on the style sheet only, you won ’t need to edit each and every page. If you frequently need to update the look of your site, CSS can save you loads of time.

As you learn to implement styles in this sophisticated manner, you’ll be amazed at the power Cascading Style Sheets bring to your bag of tricks. This chapter will introduce you to styles and teach you to create, modify, and apply them across a page or an entire Web site.

Styles:An Introduction

A style is a group of formatting specifications identified by a name. You can create a style and then apply it to characters, paragraphs, images, tables,or HTML tags

For example, you can create a style for a paragraph that specifies maroon 10-pt Verdana font on a yellow background. And you can keep on going —by setting spacing before and after the paragraph, making it right aligned, and even giving it a border. Once you ’re done creating your style, you pick a name for it —Maroon- VerdanaGrafs, for example —and then you can apply it to any paragraph with a click.

If you ’ve worked with programs like Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker, you may be familiar with this method of applying a style to specific elements. Similarly, in FrontPage, styles help you centralize the formatting of your Web pages. For instance, if you want all your Heading 1 paragraphs to be blue, you could apply blue color style to the tag using an external style sheet (more on the particular types of style sheets in a moment).After doing this only once in the style sheet, you ’d then be able to change all the Heading 1 paragraphs throughout your site. Any paragraph with an tag anywhere in your site would then be blue.

Styles are that powerful, but the technology behind them isn’t very complicated. A style is just a rule (or group of rules) for formatting some HTML. Rules are written in simple text, as in this example, which specifies that all Heading 1 paragraphs should be blue:

H1 {color:blue}

Note: Some older browsers don ’t support CSS. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer supported CSS as of their 4.0 releases. In earlier versions of these browsers, your pages display fine, just without the styles.

The Scope of Your Styles

Once you create a style, you might wonder whether its rules extend to every page throughout your site. That depends on where you create a style rule. These snippets of text can live within the HTML on an individual page, or within a separate style sheet. As you’ll see, location is everything.

Inline,embedded,and external styles

Styles can be applied at three basic levels:

•Inline styles apply directly to one specific HTML tag on a page and affect whatever text the tag contains. Inline styles control only one element at a time. The style rule lives within the element ’s HTML tag.

•Embedded styles (sometimes called internal styles) apply to an entire page. You’ll use an embedded style to control elements across a whole page. These kinds of style rules live between the page’s tags (page xvii).

•External styles apply to multiple pages. These types of style rules live within a separate file called a style sheet. A style sheet is a simple text file (whose file extension is .css) composed of nothing but rules. Any Web pages that you link to a style sheet adopt the formatting rules contained within the style sheet. You can use external styles to control elements across multiple pages or even your entire site.

Creating an Inline Style

You’ve actually already created an inline style. You often do so when you apply formatting to an HTML tag. To see this for yourself, create a hyperlink page 47).Right-click the link, select Hyperlink Properties, and then click Style. Click Format - Font. Change the color to Red, then close all the dialog boxes. Select the hyperlink and switch to Split view (page 5).Your hyperlink tag now contains a style tag:

Click here

But FrontPage doesn’t always create an inline style when you apply formatting. For instance, when you select some text and pick a font or color, FrontPage applies a tag containing your formatting. The tag adds extraneous decorative information that ’s considered outside the bounds of HTML, so it ’s losing favor on the Web (mostly because authors are always looking for ways to trim code out of their pages so they’ll download as quickly as possible).Inline styles aren’t much better than the tag, s they still clutter your document with presentation details. But once you implement page-and site-level styles, you’ll use inline styles only to override these other settings.