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Dreamweaver is an editor for web pages that offers many conveniences over a straight text editor.
Find it under "Start | Adobe ....".
There are a number of niggling details about the overall syntax of web pages that have been swept under the rug so far. It turns out that Dreamweaver makes it a bit easier to not think about these, and it's also good to set this sort of thing up when we're starting to work with Dreamweaver in it's preferences. Once these are set, Dreamweaver will create new documents with these settings and we shouldn't need to think about this sort of thing again.
Really, the correct syntax for a web page includes not only <html>, <head>, and <body> sections, but also a Document Type Declaration (DTD) at the beginning:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> ...
You can set this in Dreamweaver: "Preferences | New Documents | Default Document Type"
Browsers are very forgiving, and most of the time you won't notice the effects
of having a DOCTYPE or not. But there are two situations where it will matter:
Choose HTML 4.01 strict as your usual DOCTYPE. (XHTML 1.0 strict is certainly OK, but a bit tougher to trouble-shoot).
Text editors are very consistent about how they handle the digits 0-9 and the letters a-z we routinely use in English.
However there are several inconsistent ways of saving the characters used in non-English languages like, unmöglich or ¡Mama Mía! or sin(βt) or とり. The way you save such characters is called a "character encoding".
You can find out the special HTML entity codes for each such character, but for daily use, it's easier to set up your computer with the keyboard from the other language and type the characters in directly.
Then, you need to know what convention you're using to save your text files, and then communicate that information to the web-browser with the appropriate tag.
The tag needed (using the Unicode UTF-8 convention) is:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
and goes in your <head>...</head> section. Set yourself up for New Documents according to the screen above, and you won't ever have to worry again.
There is also variation in how computers save the line breaks in "text files". PCs, Apples, and Unix computers each have a different convention. I've found it simplest to have Dreamweaver use Unix convention (the GC webserver is a Unix computer):
Now that those setting are out of the way, open up a new document, and type a bit of text somewhere. You'll probably be typing in the Design window.
The Document window shows the page you are working on in different ways.
In the upper left you of the Document window you may select one of three different 'Views' of the document: The Code View shows the page source. The Design View shows Dreamweaver's rendering of the page (which may vary from your browsers'). The Split View (shown below) shows both. . .
At the bottom of the Document Window you will see the path in the document
"tree"to your current tag.
Clicking on the various tags will select the entire scope of that tag, may
change the property inspector, or let you edit things about just that tag
in the hierarchy:
The Property Inspector shows different options for the object
selected. That window changes, depending on what is selected.
Miscellaneous things to know:
Dreamweaver has a bright green triangle that lets you validate your document from within DW.