Advanced Page Design

HTML is a markup language for text. Once you start integrating interactivity in to your Web sites, you are going to need more complex code. FrontPage has great support for forms and CSS, as you will see in this section.

Forms and Interactive Page Templates

The first part of a form is in designing the form elements. FrontPage 2003 lets you quickly build forms through the Design view.

The second part is in handling the form content. If FrontPage Extensions are installed on the server your site is hosted on, FrontPage gives you the ability to send the form content directly to a file, email address, or database. If you are working with form handlers external to those provided with FrontPage Extensions, you can call any custom script. All this is possible through the Form Properties dialog box seen in Figure 2.19.

Figure 2.19. Build your form quickly with FrontPage 2003 and send the data to a file, email address, database, or external script.

For more on the use of forms in Web design, see "Using Forms," p. 359.

Style Sheets

The use of style sheets in Web design has grown considerably in the last few years. FrontPage 2003 embraces the technology and introduces a new set of tools to help integrate them in to your Web design process.

FrontPage 2003 now uses CSS to apply FrontPage Themes. This makes their implementation smaller, more transparent, and easier to control.

In addition to direct support for the development of CSS, FrontPage also provides several CSS templates, as seen in Figure 2.20. Use them as the basis for any CSS files you might use in the Web design process.

Figure 2.20. You can jump-start your CSS development with the CSS templates provided by FrontPage 2003.

For more on the use of style sheets in Web design and how FrontPage handles them, see "Using Style Sheets to Format Web Pages," p. 385.