Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver

How do you manage to look intelligent when someone throws Dreamweaver jargon at you? Here’s a very brief primer.

“Add an image swap behaviour...”

Just remember that anytime a user mouses over a menu item and the item gets highlighted, that's an “image swap”; and a “behaviour” is jargon for JavaScript codes that can be built into a document. It’s “a combination of an event and an action". “Behaviour” is a term you'll come across pretty often.

“CSS Styles...”

You're bound to hear that from anyone who's building a Web site. All you need to remember is, “The W3C-approved method for presenting and positioning objects in a Web page is using cascading style sheets (CSS). Dreamweaver makes it easy to define styles.”

“Layers...”

When someone mentions layers, you’ll know what they're talking about if you remember this: “Dreamweaver uses DHTML to make layers. DHTML is a scripting language that allows HTML to change even after a page has been loaded into a browser.” Of course, you've also got to remember that layers are a little bit like containers for stuff on the page. You can actually specify exact coordinates and some other stuff like hiding particular layers. You can have many layers on one page and hide each one until required.

“Just re-use that snippet...”

Reusing code pieces, also known as ‘snippets’, is supposed to be “a great way to save time.” And as for “bindings”, we don’t know what they are, so just rote-learn the following: “The Bindings tab of the Applications panel holds dynamic content in a safe place for you to easily access and bind as you build your documents.

For example, when you create a recordset, it will be listed under the Server Behaviors tab, and accessible under the Bindings tab. You will be able to bind recordset columns into your document.”