Adobe 38040334 Extending Dreamweaver - Page 85

DREAMWEAVER CS3 79 Extending Dreamweaver When you design an extension, you should determine what variables are necessary and what form elements can best handle them. Consider the following basic guidelines when you design an extension UI: • To name your extension, place the name in the title tag of your HTML file. Dreamweaver displays the name in the extension title bar. • Keep text labels on the left side of your UI, aligned right, with text boxes on the right side, aligned left. This arrangement lets the user's eyes easily locate the beginning of any text box. Minimal text can follow the text box as explanation or units of measure. • Keep check box and radio button labels on the right side of your UI, aligned left. • For readable code, assign logical names to your text boxes. If you use Dreamweaver to create your extension UI, you can use the Property inspector or the Quick Tag Editor to assign names to the fields. In a typical scenario, after you create the UI, you test the extension code to see that it properly performs the following UI-related tasks: • Getting the values from the text boxes • Setting default values for the text boxes or gathering values from the selection • Applying changes to the user document Dreamweaver HTML rendering control In earlier versions of Dreamweaver (up to Dreamweaver 4), Dreamweaver rendered more space around form controls than Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator do. Form controls in extension UIs are rendered with extra space around them because Dreamweaver uses its HTML rendering engine to display extension UIs. In later versions of Dreamweaver, the form-control rendering more closely matches the browsers. To take advantage of the rendering improvements, you must use one of three new DOCTYPE statements in your extension files, as shown in the following examples: In most cases, DOCTYPE statements must go on the first line of a document. However, to avoid conflicts with extension-specific directives that, in previous versions, were required to be on the first line of a file (such as the comment at the top of a Property inspector file, or the MENU-LOCATION=NONE directive in a command), DOCTYPE statements and directives can now be in any order as long as they appear before the opening html tag. In addition to letting you make extension UIs more closely match the built-in dialog boxes and panels, the new DOCTYPE statements also let you view your extensions in the Dreamweaver Design view so that you can see them as they would appear when viewed by users. You can see three examples where the dialog case is used in the following files in the Configuration/Commands folder: CFLoginWizard.htm, TeamAdminDlgDates.html, and TeamAdminDlgDays.html The following examples show the Base Property inspector without the DOCTYPE statement, which improves formcontrol rendering, and then with the DOCTYPE statement.