| I'll admit it. I used to avoid Cascading Style Sheets at all costs. Frankly, all that extra time developing classes and coding the style sheets just never seemed worth it. Plus, there was just something scary about them. But with Dreamweaver MX 2004, there's really no excuse for not moving toward the future of Web standards and embracing style sheets. Dreamweaver makes them easy. So easy, in fact, that you can build your pages without really even knowing that Dreamweaver is using style sheets or worrying about whether or not they're correct. That's the great thing about Dreamweaver ”clean, worry-free code. The difficulty, however, comes in updating existing sites that rely on the Font element and <Body> tag to control page properties. Changing these sites to CSS can be a bit of a daunting task, but after you begin classifying your text and thinking in the terms of what style would be appropriate in which situation, you'll probably find that creating classes and style sheets isn't really the ominous task that you thought it would be. In the long run, you'll find that Dreamweaver's new CSS integration can make your life a lot easier by allowing you to create portable style sheets that can be transferred from one site to another. After you become comfortable with the process of creating styles and applying them becomes second-nature, you'll most likely look back and wonder why you didn't begin the conversion to CSS sooner. |
