Operation Manual

USING DREAMWEAVER

Creating and Managing Files

Last updated 3/28/2012

CFML ColdFusion Markup Language files have a .cfm extension. They are used to process dynamic pages.

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor files have a .php extension and are used to process dynamic pages.

More Help topics

“Displaying XML data with XSLT” on page 470

“Building applications visually” on page 576

“Understanding Cascading Style Sheets” on page 116

Create a blank page

You can create a page that contains a predesigned CSS layout, or create a completely blank page and then create a

layout of your own.

1 Select File > New.

2 In the Blank Page category of the New Document dialog box, select the kind of page you want to create from the

Page Type column. For example, select HTML to create a plain HTML page, select ColdFusion to create a

ColdFusion page, and so on.

3 If you want your new page to contain a CSS layout, select a predesigned CSS layout from the Layout column;

otherwise, select None. Based on your selection, a preview and description of the selected layout appears on the

right side of the dialog box.

The predesigned CSS layouts provide the following types of columns:

Fixed Column width is specified in pixels. The column does not resize based on the size of the browser or the site

visitor’s text settings.

Liquid Column width is specified as a percentage of the site visitor’s browser width. The design adapts if the site visitor

makes the browser wider or narrower, but does not change based on the site visitor’s text settings.

Dreamweaver also offers two HTML5 CSS layouts: two- and three-column fixed.

4 Select a document type from the DocType pop-up menu. In most cases, you can use the default selection, XHTML

1.0 Transitional.

Selecting one of the XHTML document type definitions from the DocType (DTD) menu makes your page XHTML-

compliant. For example, you can make an HTML document XHTML-compliant by selecting XHTML 1.0 Transitional

or XHTML 1.0 Strict from the menu. XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a reformulation of HTML

as an XML application. Generally, using XHTML gives you the benefits of XML, while ensuring the backward and

future compatibility of your web documents.

Note: For more information about XHTML, see the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website, which contains the

specification for XHTML 1.1 - Module-Based XHTML (

www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/) and XHTML 1.0

(www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/), as well as XHTML validator sites for web-based files (http://validator.w3.org/) and local

files (http://validator.w3.org/file-upload.html).

Dreamweaver also offers HTML5 as a doctype option.

5 If you selected a CSS layout in the Layout column, select a location for the layout’s CSS from the Layout CSS pop-

up menu.

Add To Head Adds CSS for the layout to the head of the page you’re creating.

Create New File Adds CSS for the layout to a new external CSS file and attaches the new style sheet to the page you’re

creating.