The Behaviors Panel has many important features on Dreamweaver CS3. This panel allows you to do all sorts of things. For example, you can add a popup window, detect the user's browser, and change the way text can enter the screen. Other properties that can be used are timeline, reloading images, and even validate forms. Validating forms allows you to set the requirements for what needs to be entered in a form.
If your looking for another behavior that you don't have don't panic. Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 provides an extension manager. This allows you to add behaviors that you need to create your web page. Thousands of third party behaviors are ready at your disposal.
Templates are extremely useful in Web-Page Design. Templates add consistancy and updates changes throughout the site. This is important because if you make a change to one page it updates all of them. So if a specific element that is used in multiple pages is changed, all those elements update to the altered element.
Creating templates is easily done in Dreamweaver. Features such colors, fonts, style sheets, tables, images, and behaviors are all available at your disposal. After a template has been created, you can use that template in multiple web pages.
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Library Items and Templates can tend to be misused. Where templates are used to save entire layouts, library items are used to save small pieces of code used for multiple pages. Library Items tend to be used with copyright statements. Most of the time you will have multiple pages with multiple templates with copyright information. With a library item, it saves multiple steps by using a library item. As the copyright years change, changing them are far easy with library items.
Automating Repetitive Tasks is a huge time saver. This option allows you to repeat boring tasks you do throughout web-page design. Such options include the History Panel, custom objects, and commands. Dreamweaver provides all of these options. Another feature provided is the Find and Replace option which allows to change multiple pages at once.
The History Panel is the most important panel. This panel displays the last 50 steps you've performed. You can undo and redo steps you've done. You can always save these steps as commands in later steps in the assignments.
Automating Repetitive Tasks, in my opinion, is a huge beneficiary. Throughout my assignments doing tasks over and over can complicate my time. Being able to take short-cuts such as Find and Replace can benefit me in the long run.
In recent years, web pages have become dynamic and data-driven. To make this possible we use spry tools. Spry tools make web browsing easy for the user. One tool that can be used is the spry-table this allows you to create a table in one step rather than typing in each category.
Adding spry detail regions can also make your table professional. This allows you to have each region clickable and when clicked and image will appear simultaneously.
Other tools that can be used are spry widgets.
This can add functionality to your page. The menu bar tool inserts a navigation bar with drop-down menus. The tabbed panel inserts containers that appear with the click of a tab. The collapsible panel when clicked drops down to show information. Lastly the accordion is multible collapsible panels combined.
Ajax or Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Ajax usually required previous knowledge of javascript but Dreamweaver gives us spry which allows us to use it with little knowledge of java. XML is the extensible markup language. Spry is the framework Dreamweaver uses to allow you to alter ajax changes into your web pages and provides a fun experience for the user. Spry widgets allow you to incorporate XML date, regulate form widgets, add creative layouts.
