CWSA November Meeting
Last night’s meeting was another huge success. Brad Colbow took us back to the basics of HTML and CSS with a great presentation. He used a design that he’d been working on with the client’s permission to demonstrate how he broke up and styled the pieces of the page. When he showed the design, my jaw dropped. Now there is talent. I was also keenly interested in how he broke up the page, which sections were which. It was enlightening for all, I think.
Following the presentation I got to talk with some of the other members, which is always fun. I am learning that I know more than I thought. When I initially joined the group, I was really unsure of my techniques and I really wanted to find out what best practices the pros used. I’ve found that a lot of what I am doing is The Right Way, which is really an ego boost. I’m also learning about how others solve the same problems I’ve run into, or at least that I’m not an idiot because someone else actually did have the same issue.
Chris Hattery and Bridget Stewart talked abut their experience with Dreamweaver, which is something I’ve heard of, but never used. Sounds like it has a lot of the features I love from TextMate. I had thought that Dreamweaver was strictly WYSIWTF, but apparently it is a really good IDE for XHTML and CSS. Who knew?
Next month promises to be another fabulous meeting. Joseph announced that we’d be doing a CSS tips ’n tricks session, with anyone who wants to presenting on a technique they’ve used. I can’t wait!!
November 7th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I really love Dreamweaver, and I haven’t used the WSIWYG features for years. It has some drawbacks, it’s a pretty big resource hog. You don’t really want it to do any of your coding for you, especially Javascript or you’ll get garbage. I use it mostly as a text editor. I like the code hinting, auto-completing of tags, and the FTP file manager. It’s nice to have everything all in one application. Additionally, when configured properly you can make some pretty nice templates for yourself if you always use the same shell for a site. (It declares my DOCTYPE for me, and I set it to declare Unicode for charset since the default is ISO.)
If you’re comfortable with TextMate though, I wouldn’t bother switching. TextMate is a pretty good value, Dreamweaver is considerably more expensive. I’m also a fan of BBEdit.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Ditto everything you just said above!
November 9th, 2007 at 9:48 am
What you see is WTF - I had to follow the cartoon link before it sank in. Very funny.
Glad I found your site!