I've just recently downloaded dreamweaver cs6. I've been following tutorials online, and I've run into a bit of a snag. I'm almost embarrassed asking this question, because I know I must be missing something obvious, but here it goes:
I'm following a tutorial right now on making a drop-down menu out of pure CSS. After implementing the first few lines of CSS code I was losing all of my sub menus in the drop-down. After pulling my hair out trying to figure out why for the better part of 2 hours, I finally preview in Firefox. (can't believe I didn't try earlier.)
It all seems to work fine in my browser, but I was wondering: Is there a way I can look at it in Dreamweaver? Its really inconvenient popping in and out of my browser everytime I want to check something. Like I said, I'm basically (not really basically, I just am) a complete noob at all things web-design. Thank you for your time.
Dreamweaver is just an IDE and it is not a browser. It doesn't execute :hover events and JavaScripts. You need to preview what you have done using F12 and check it out. :)
Short answer: no. At least, there's no reasonable expectation that you should. The problem with web-design is that the only real way to do things properly is to code by hand and preview it in a browser in another window - this does come as a culture-shock to "designers" who are used to WYSIWYG programs like Photoshop and InDesign, but the web is a completely different media where the underlying markup matters the most and is open to re-interpretation by browsers.
Dreamweaver has historically had good WYSIWYG rendering (thanks to their partnership with Opera years ago) but ultimately it's still not the best way.
I note that Microsoft's "Expression Blend for HTML/JS Applications" (there's a mouthful) does actually have first-class design-time WYSIWYG support because it works directly with an instance of IE, so you can test things like :hover and client scripts at design time - unfortunately it isn't suited to actual "web" sites - just "desktop" HTML, which is a shame.
Related
I know that there are several very similarly-related questions on this website, however after reviewing the play, I believe this question is unique in its own right. If someone can find and provide evidence of an exact dupe of my question, I will withdraw it myself (so please just don't downvote this!).
I am a Java developer, not a web developer. But, as is the case in so many families where there is one person who becomes the designated family "computer guy", my Java development skills have been mistaken for web development skills, and I somehow got roped into building a website for my parents to help them sell their house.
So, like any web development newbie, I wrote the HTML/CSS myself (by hand, sans editor like DW or Expression, etc.) and tested it against FireFox 3.x. All looked great, and we deployed/launched.
Now we're getting negative feedback from everyone and their dog stating that the site isn't rendering properly in other browsers, browser versions, or on FireFox installations running on different operating systems. Similarly, the site is apparently a total mess when being viewed through a smart phone or tablet device.
Now I could dive in and write a whole bunch of messy, nasty, painstakingly-tedious edits to my CSS rules, that basically say: do X when browser is Y, etc. But I am hoping that out there is a tool that can put all my fears to rest.
What I'm looking for is a tool that could take my valid CSS files, and use them to generate CSS rules that will be compatible with a high percentage of all common browsers/versions.
Alternatively, if I have to re-write my CSS from scratch, it would be nice to have a tool that allows me to write/design once, deploy many, so that I only have to focus on the design of a single CSS file, but the code that gets generated is multi-browser compatible.
It sounds like DreamWeaver kind of does this, but you have to choose from one of 16 pre-existing templates.
My wife is a graphic designer, and made the website pretty sweet (not cookie cutter). It was a nightmare trying to figure out what CSS rules to use to implement her design. So any tool that forces you to choose between templates is not an option.
Is there any hope for me, or do I banish myself from my family in shame right now?
css is a mess, no way to automatically doing it right. saying that I would say there are tools that would walk with you the proper way.
1. use the meta tag:
http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" (encpsulate as a meta tag - SO won't display if I wrote it as a valid tag)
to force IE to render with it's most modern engine, that would solve some problems.
2.begin your css with normalize.css - that would eliminate some of the cross browser problems - because it resets your css (better and more modern the reset.css)
I'll second the GWT if you come from the java dev world. although It's a framework to learn with it's own quirks. another possible web framework is Grails - a nice java/groovy port of the mighty Ror.
Less or Scss won't automatically solve your basic problem - which is browser compatibily - but are a better and simpler way to write css
remember that most css3 properties aren't support equally in all browsers (and in IE almost not supported) - use them only with graceful downgrade option with supported js or css -when Modernizr js library can give you pretty good property support detection for various browsers
don't go dreamweaver - it produces terrible code
use csslint to check for valid css and common css pitfalls
If you must use cutting edge web rendering with html5+css3 elements you should look into chrome frame -that would enable older browser better support of your site - although I believe this may be an overkill for a simple sell-my-house kind of site.
use a css framework to prototype- it would give you better css, good basics and resets and good boilerplate - maybe bootstrap or something similiar (didn't try most of them but the internet is crowded with those.
good luck
Check out modernizr. http://www.modernizr.com/docs/
You want to get into the position of checking for features and not browsers.
Here's an excellent site to check your site with alternative browsers:
http://www.browserstack.com/
Less (http://lesscss.org/) will help you with a lot of CSS3 functions.
However, good CSS code simply works on all browsers. There are some CSS concepts that must always be avoided as much as possible (absolute positioning, excessive floats, using the wrong elements for a task, etc) and your code will work better.
In the many years I have programmed I only needed browser-specific code in the first two years. Then I grew up and learned which CSS code not to use and when it was possible to use them. It has been my experience that properly written CSS code works on all browsers, and if it doesn't it will at least get the basic concepts right (eg. a few pixels may be wrong or some effects, but the site still works well).
Several things come to mind that may help your case:
Forget about IE6, that one will give you trouble no matter how much effort you put into the site.
Make sure you have a good doctype (html5 or xhtml would be good).
Try out html5 reset, it tries to make sure all browsers behave the same.
The aforementioned reset also includes modernizr to bring older browsers up to speed
Finally: accept (some even say "embrace") that different browsers render things slightly different. Getting every pixel exactly the same in each browser will be near impossible.
I hate to put this into the world, but it sounds like you need Adobe Muse.
There is no equal to a good developer who will write clean cross browser code, but if you just want to get the site done check out the beta: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/muse/
What I'm looking for is a tool that could take my valid CSS files, and
use them to generate CSS rules that will be compatible with a high
percentage of all common browsers/versions.
Unfortunately there's no such a tool and you have to debug and test your website for cross-browser compatibility manually. The best way i've found for cross-browser testing it to install and test different versions of browsers in several virtual machines.
You will also find the following helpful:
Modernizr
Google Web Toolkit
i have some ASP.NET pages.
pages does not appear in FireFox4 same IE9.
i want to find my HTML or CSS Design problems.
i hared that this is a tool for finding problems.
but i can't use it because my ASP.NET Page contains some usercontrols.
I am looking for a way to find my design problems(tool , tip , etc).
another note is i am using jQuery UI plugins in my site.
One approach would be to use Chrome Developer Tools / Firebug / IE 8 Developer Tools to take a peek at the HTML being generated to look for any glaring errors. It can also help catch some jQuery issue that might be causing you grief.
Outside of that, HTML Tidy is a nice program that could help diagnose some stuff for you as well.
One thing to realize is that every browser renders a page slightly different, despite the attempts to render them in a "universal" manner. If you're really looking for the small differences, you can check out the SuperPreview tool that comes with Microsoft Expression Web
I'm doing css for a website. I send the html and css to a guy, he puts it into ASP.net. The problem is that the transfer didn't end well for my code and it needs some fixing. The problem is that when I look at it in Chrome, or Firefox, or IE8, I get three completely different renderings. I spent a good amount of time trying to fix a drop-down menu that is supposed to appear while hovering over a link. The one he had in place from ASP.net worked in IE, kinda worked in Firefox, and was completely broken in Chrome (I haven't tested Safari or Opera.) Just getting it to look basically the same in firefox and chrome was a struggle. The html source is showing me two completely different pages as well.
Does anyone have experience with this? I know nothing of ASP.net, and it seems like the guy is modifying my layout with a wsyiwyg (I found tables used in random places, which I did not put there.) Faced with this, what is my best option? Is this fixable, or am I in over my head?
Many times WYSIWYG programs don't generate code that results in reliable, consistent renderings. However, there are a few things you can do to check your site's consistency.
You can use a program like Adobe BrowserLab (there's a free trial right now) to automatically render your page in multiple browsers side by side
You can use the w3 Validator to make sure that your code is standards compliant. If your code isn't standards compliant, then you will likely have issues across browsers.
Note that you can force asp.net to generate XHTML Transitional- or Strict-compliant code (if that's the standard you choose to implement) via the web.config file. Use the directive
<xhtmlConformance mode="Transitional"/>
if you want to enable this behavior.
Was your code rendering fine in those browsers before you sent it off to the .NET guy? If so, the programmer is doing something to muck up your work. ASP .NET won't change the way your code renders... it's simply the Windows equivalent of PHP (simply put).
I would suggest (if you haven't already) testing your code before hand-off to verify proper rendering. Take some screenshots, and if after sending your code to this developer things break, you can point out that it was working until he started messing with your markup. If that ends up being the case, at least you know it wasn't you. If it was, then we have more work to do. :)
Can you provide any samples?
The html source is showing me two completely different pages as well.
That sounds like your asp.net guy is doing something wrong there. You can use asp.net to do browser-dependant rendering, but it sounds more like his job is to just make the site render what you gave him, and it's usually better to get your html and css right to begin with.
So I'm supposed to be a .Net Developer but have found myself getting stuck with allot of css and html stuff lately. I would now consider myself to be very strong in css and all it's intricacies. With that said I still see any use it any of the Visual Studio support for it outside of the intellisense (when it works).
I want to ask if anyone developers that view themselves strong in css are using any of the Visual Studio 2008 css support features and if so what they are and why they use them over say firebug?
Thanks,
Denis
Hand coded all the way for me.
Firebug is really good for getting to the bottom of wierd browser issues, but generally I have IE, Chrome and Firefox open when I'm coding html & CSS, and I just make sure I hit the refresh button often enough in all three of them to make sure I don't get any nasty suprises after writing a pile of css.
Typically I turn off all of the Visual Studio CSS stuff. It's not exactly well made. Instead I've been using MS Expression to build master pages and manage CSS files. It is light years ahead of VS.
That said, I see firebug as a complimentary product, not really a replacement. I use FireBug and the equivalents in safari, chrome, and IE 8 to see what's going on with the internals of a particular element on a page. I use Expression to edit and maintain the css.
I have a small website developed using VS2005 and mySQl, it's just 2 webforms and login page.
During the development and testing phase, me and my customer were using IE6, and it was looking fine, we didn't test with other browsers because it's a small application, and just a add-in for large desktop application.
The customer informed me that site doesn't like the same when he installed IE7, for example I have a webfrom that show a page with Gridview that has multiply pages(AllowPaging=On), it doesn't look fine in IE7 and I can't navigate to other pages in Gridview, but it was working fine with IE6, and there's no complicated things, just plan GridView with small formatting.
I installed IE8 and doesn't look fine with it too, even in compatibility mood.
Have anyone faced the same problem?, and what should be the quickest or best solution for that?.
I know, I SHOULD NEVER USE WEBFORMS AGAIN.
The only reason for a difference in look between the browser versions is your styling and doctype.
Start with setting a doctype to run in quirks mode. You can get information about it here.
After that, see if things improve. If not, I would start ripping out any css/styles/themes you may be using. Then build it back up using normal CSS.
Incidentally, web forms isn't the problem in this case; it's a styling issue.
as Chris mentioned, add to that that browsers have really some annoying differences that makes you pull your hair sometimes, and 90 % of the time it is related to CSS.
so what i suggest is the following
use a tool called IE Tester, it is amazing tool that let you test your sites in all IE versions.
Use conditional command for targeting IE specific version if some CSS rule is wrong.
we use this tool http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ it is really amazing it let you define css rules for each browser without hacking or conditional statement, but the down side it is Javascript dependent, but we had no complains.
also this script http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/ which is brilliant, it will let IE 6 behave like IE 7 which will save you tons of problems, again it is Java Script dependent.
Avoid Hacks as much as possible, the above methods will help you a lot.
hope this helps.