User Guide

358 Chapter 14: Optimizing and Exporting

■ Export an HTML file, open it in an HTML editor, manually copy sections of code from

the file, and paste that code into another HTML document.

■ Use the Update HTML command to make changes to an HTML file you’ve

previously created.

By default, Fireworks specifies UTF-8 encoding when you export HTML, which ensures that

the characters in the HTML file will be displayed correctly for all languages.

You can also export HTML as Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layers and XHTML.

To define how Fireworks exports HTML, you use the HTML Setup dialog box. These

settings can be document-specific or used as your default settings for all HTML that

Fireworks exports.

About HTML

HTML code is automatically generated by Fireworks when you export, copy, or update

HTML. You do not need to understand it to use it. After it is generated there is no need to

change it to make it work, as long as you do not rename or move files.

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is currently the standard for displaying web pages

on the Internet. An HTML file is a text file that contains these elements:

■ Text that will appear on the web page

■ HTML tags that define the formatting and structure of that text and of the entire

document as well as links to images and other HTML documents (web pages)

HTML tags are enclosed in brackets and look something like this:

<TAG> affected text </TAG>

The opening tag tells a browser to format the text following in a certain way or to include

a graphic. The closing tag (

</TAG>), when there is one, indicates the end of that

formatting.

Including comments in HTML

Fireworks HTML is well commented, telling you what the pieces of code relate to. Fireworks

HTML comments begin with

. Anything between these two markers

is not interpreted as HTML or JavaScript code. If you want comments included in your

HTML, you must tell Fireworks you want this option turned on.

NOTE

Macromedia Dreamweaver shares a tight integration with Fireworks. Fireworks handles

the export of HTML to Dreamweaver differently than it handles export to other HTML

editors. If you are exporting Fireworks HTML to Dreamweaver, see “Working with

Macromedia Dreamweaver” on page 374.