I Want Persistent Design-Time Stylesheets in Dreamweaver

February 21st, 2006

Recently, I started designing Web sites based on Dreamweaver templates. It was something I avoided as long as I could since I prefer to create my own PHP driven templates. They are simple and never break!

Since Dreamweaver’s internal CSS rendering engine differs from those in Web browsers, the folks at Macromedia kindly created something called design-time stylesheets that can be used to make things look attractive and useful as clients maintain their pages.

There is a major drawback. When I create a template, I expect the behavior emulated in that template to be passed to any page created with it. Reasonable right? Design-time stylesheets, however, cannot be passed on to child pages at present.

What this means is that my carefully crafted Dreamweaver CSS hacks will not grace new pages created by clients. I don’t expect clients to have to learn how to add design-time stylesheets, but will need to alter my expectations for now.

Macromedia, are you listening? Please create persistent design-time stylesheets so CSS Web designers can avoid headaches!

By the way, Stephanie Sullivan at Community MX says, “Paul Boon created an extension at CMX that allows you to put it on a whole group of pages (or entire site) at once.” This is part of a solution I suppose.

Entry Filed under: Book & Software Reviews, Tutorials