Faster Smarter Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003

Going Further & Doing More with Tables, Layers , Frames and Style Sheets

FrontPage 2003 supports all the latest HTML/XHTML features including:

• Tables

• Layers

• Frames

• Style sheets

Let s look at each of these advanced authoring features in turn , and then look at how FrontPage 2003 supports them.

Control Page Layout with Tables and Layers

Tables are used to lay out content in rows and columns . Tables and table cells can have borders and backgrounds, which are different from each other and from the rest of the page, and in addition to text, can include images, form fields and any other type of HTML content. Because tables provide more control over the appearance of the page, you can use tables as a central design element. For example, you could use tables to lay out form fields and their associated text.

If you ve worked with previous versions of FrontPage, you know that support for layers is new in FrontPage 2003. When you work with layers, you embed layers of content within a page. Layers are like floating panels that you can size , position and stack one on top of the other.

Browsers position layers using a 3-dimensional axis with X, Y and Z coordinates. The X and Y coordinates allow you to position the layer relative to the top, left corner of the page or other content. The Z coordinate lets you stack layers in front or behind each other or other content on the page. Layers can have unique borders and background shading as well.

Control Formatting Quickly and Easily with Style Sheets

Markup languages, such as HTML, define the structure of pages, and for the most part, don t say anything about the way a page should look when you view it in a browser. Therefore, when you include markup that says this element is a level 1 heading, and this element is a paragraph of text, the tags themselves don t say anything about how a browser displays the heading and paragraph. Because of this, your browser might display the page differently from someone else s browser.

To be more specific about how a browser should display a page, you can use style sheets ”which allow you to be very specific about formatting and positioning. You can, for example, say that the font face for the heading is bold 24-point Haettenschweiler, the font color is brown, and that the background is highlighted yellow. You could extend this style definition by adding spacing before and after the level 1 heading, a wide right margin, and an inset border.

Two Web technologies specify what features are available for style sheets:

• Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1) Defines the formatting styles available for use with Web pages.

• Cascading Style Sheets level 2 (CSS2) Defines the positioning styles available for use with Web pages.

FrontPage 2003 makes using style sheets easy, regardless of whether you are using HTML, XHTML, XML or another Web language. You can add style definitions to any single element, groups of elements, or entire pages.

Dividing the Browser Window with Frames

Frames allow you to divide the browser window into sections. Each section, or frame, has its own associated document, and its links can open documents in other frames. For example, you could create a frame-enhanced page with three sections: header, main contents and footer. You create the header, contents and footer as separate documents, specifying that links in the header open new documents in the contents area, and that links in the contents display details or footnote references in the footnotes area.

An inline frame is another type of frame. You insert inline frames into a Web page using a fixed or relative size and position. As with a standard frame, the contents of an inline frame come from a separate document. Inline frames offer a unique design opportunity, however, because they have their own scroll bars, and content that flows separately from the main document. You can, for example, click on a link in the inline frame to open a new document in the frame, without the contents of the main page changing.

When used properly, frames can help make your site easier to navigate. Nevertheless, frames also have a bad reputation because they are frequently misused, actually making sites more difficult and confusing to navigate than they would be otherwise .