This book goes to press at a time of radical developments in the evolution of web design. Mobile design is no longer an afterthought but integral to the process of building websites from conception to completion. New features in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript have eclipsed older technologies for animation and interactivity. Native video has supplanted plugin-based media. Moreover, new HTML5 and CSS3 tools have brought about a sea of change in everything from form design to graphical styling.
Dreamweaver CS6 addresses these new demands, and this book shows you how to take maximum advantage of new features and how to repurpose established Dreamweaver features to solve new design challenges.
For readers new to Dreamweaver, this book provides a solid, compressed introduction to the essential building blocks for creating cutting-edge and stable sites. For experienced Dreamweaver designers, this book explains how to take advantage of the new features available in CS6 in detail, with particular focus on new features for designing mobile sites in jQuery Mobile and for generating apps.
This book starts off by teaching you how to create web pages in Dreamweaver using the latest technology and approaches—HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It demonstrates how to create or customize pages with HTML5 layouts and add HMTL5 native audio and video to these pages. Then you will learn to add CSS3 effects to web pages using Dreamweaver, and sometimes push beyond the features available in Dreamweaver.
The later chapters of the book focus on mobile design. The book covers Dreamweaver CS6's tools for responsive design, to adjust the display to match a user's device, to learn how to build jQuery-based web apps, and to learn how to convert those web apps to free-standing apps that run without a browser. By the time you're finished, you'll have learned several techniques to use the latest features of Dreamweaver for web and mobile development.
Chapter 1, Creating Sites and Pages with Dreamweaver CS6, provides a compressed overview and introduction to Dreamweaver CS6, including defining a site, creating HTML5 pages, applying tags with the Properties inspector, defining links, inserting images, linking to external stylesheets, and designing pages with ID and class div tags.
Chapter 2, Using HTML5 for Page Structure, explores how to build web pages by relying on new, standardized semantic page structuring elements in HTML5, including <header>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and <footer>.
Chapter 3, Collecting Data with Forms, covers generating client-side (JavaScript) forms for navigation, defining forms with Spry validation fields, applying HTML5 parameters to form fields, styling forms, and connecting forms with real-world server applications.
Chapter 4, Applying CSS3 Effects and Transforms, covers shadows, border radius, and opacity; designing with CSS3 transform; and creating animation with CSS3 and Dreamweaver animation tools.
Chapter 5, Embedding HTML5 Native Audio and Video, is about preparing, embedding, and testing native audio and video.
Chapter 6, Responsive Design with Media Queries, discusses defining stylesheets to customize the display in laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Chapter 7, Creating Mobile Pages with jQuery Mobile, is about creating pages based on jQuery Mobile—accessible, inviting, and animated pages that work particularly well in mobile devices.
Chapter 8, Enhancing Mobile Sites, discusses adding layout grids, collapsible blocks, and mobile-friendly forms.
Chapter 9, Customizing Themes with ThemeRoller, covers applying jQuery Mobile themes with Dreamweaver CS6 swatches, customizing themes with ThemeRoller, and applying custom themes.
Chapter 10, Building Apps with PhoneGap, delves into publishing mobile apps for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) and Android devices using new tools in Dreamweaver 6.
To work through this book most effectively, you need access to Dreamweaver CS6 or higher. However, the book includes tips and notes to enable designers using earlier versions of Dreamweaver, right back till Version 3, to take advantage of Adobe-provided tools for creating HTML5-based and CSS3-based websites.
This book is apt for experienced Dreamweaver web designers looking to migrate to HTML5 and jQuery. It also targets web designers new to Dreamweaver who want to jump with two feet into the most current web design tools and features. While focusing primarily on Dreamweaver CS6, this book includes content of value to readers using older versions of Dreamweaver, with directions on installing a version of Adobe's HTML5 Pack that updates those packages.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "As this is going to be a one-page site, the index.html filename will open the page when the site's URL is addressed in a browser."
A block of code is set as follows:
<div data-role="collapsible" data-collapsed="true">
<h3>Header</h3>
<p>Content</p>
</div>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Doing this opens the Select Image Source dialog."
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