A clarifiation on web design
Thanks for all the info. Most of this I am learning in school. Today you have to design for the blind, legally blind, hearing impaired, for small hand held items and large browsers. Yep Firefox is taking over. Right now I am reading the Zen of CSS book and every other chapter talks about support problems with IE. I really don't like to work on
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PHP. PHP is an industry de facto standard. Mainly because so many sites are built using it and nearly every web host provider makes it readily available to clients. PHP 5 is the better version. My web host provider finally upgraded to PHP 5. Yay.
XHTML. XHTML is 99% backward compatible with HTML 4, so a page written in XHTML should display properly on any standards compliant browser that has been in use since about 2000. The reason for the "X" is that the W3C standards folks modified HTML to be valid XML. By being valid XML, it makes life easier for developers to write programs using existing XML parsers and transforms. It also forces the web page to be properly constructed. In the "old days", many web developers were sloppy and left off tags because the browser would fix it. With XHTML, you have to include the proper tags and ending tags for the document to be valid.
DIV tag. I think there is an option you can set whether Dreamweaver uses divisions or tables for layout. Also, it depends on which template you selected when starting the page. CSS-driven page design means you use HTML to convey content and use CSS to convey presentation. So, if you want the page to show two columns, the CSS-driven approach puts the content into two divisions (DIV) and then using CSS layout those two divisions to be side-by-side. With no change to the HTML, you could show the same page as a single column by simply changing the CSS. In the old school, people would use TABLES to create two columns of content on a page. But TABLES were not originally designed for page layout, but to show tabular information. Also, it turns out that layout using DIV is more efficient than layout with TABLES.
Web 2.0 page. I like the following page. Have to skip over all the begging to buy the guy's book, but much of the information in the book he presents on the site anyway.
http://webdesignfromscratch.com/web-2.0-design-style-guide.php
Colour management. I have found that getting the right tools, such as learning the colour management within the Adobe products, a screen calibration tool such as Spyder2 Pro, scanner calibration tools, and printer calibration tools can make printing what you see a whole lot easier.
Enter pages (aka splash page). Anyone still creating a splash page either hasn't updated their site in 10 years or doesn't keep up with the industry. Every expert in the industry has declared war on splash pages. They must go away.
References. For usability and overall web design, I would recommend books by Jakob Nielson. For web standards, I would recommend books by Jeffrey Zeldman.
Good place to start is: http://AListApart.com/
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