Dreamflex Web School

Creating a submit button from a graphic in Dreamweaver (MX/MX 2004)

Tired of the old gray Submit button? You can easily replace it with a graphic of your choice–just follow these steps. First, select Insert > Form Objects > Image Field. Next, locate the image you want to use and click OK. If Dreamweaver asks you if you want to add a form tag, click Select. Then, open the Property inspector and change the ImageField text to Submit. Select the image to display it on the page and you’re all set. Your graphic now works the same as a standard Submit button.

 

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For future compatibility, use hexadecimal character encoding

To display a character to the user instead of having the browser try to interpret it as code, you use character entities (i.e., escape sequences). You may be used to writing these in decimal format; for instance, to display the less-than symbol (<), you may write the following (with leading 0s being optional):

<

However, the latest W3C proposed recommendation “Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0″ recommends that you write such escape sequences in hexadecimal. The reasoning is that now that Unicode is the standard text format (to accomodate the use of characters different languages), hexadecimal will become more common, and decimal representations of characters less common. Hence, to write the less-than symbol, insert the letter “x” to show the number is hexadecimal, and then write 60 in base 16, which comes out to “3c.” As a result, you’ll get this:

<

Of course, both < and < display as the character “&lt;” in modern browers. But in the future, the second form may become easier to look up in reference sources.

You can find the Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0 at the following address:

www.w3.org/TR/charmod/

 in Dreamweaver (MX/MX 2004)

Tired of the old gray Submit button? You can easily replace it with a graphic of your choice–just follow these steps. First, select Insert > Form Objects > Image Field. Next, locate the image you want to use and click OK. If Dreamweaver asks you if you want to add a form tag, click Select. Then, open the Property inspector and change the ImageField text to Submit. Select the image to display it on the page and you’re all set. Your graphic now works the same as a standard Submit button.

 

---

 

For future compatibility, use hexadecimal character encoding

To display a character to the user instead of having the browser try to interpret it as code, you use character entities (i.e., escape sequences). You may be used to writing these in decimal format; for instance, to display the less-than symbol (&lt;), you may write the following (with leading 0s being optional):

<

However, the latest W3C proposed recommendation “Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0″ recommends that you write such escape sequences in hexadecimal. The reasoning is that now that Unicode is the standard text format (to accomodate the use of characters different languages), hexadecimal will become more common, and decimal representations of characters less common. Hence, to write the less-than symbol, insert the letter “x” to show the number is hexadecimal, and then write 60 in base 16, which comes out to “3c.” As a result, you’ll get this:

<

Of course, both < and < display as the character “&lt;” in modern browers. But in the future, the second form may become easier to look up in reference sources.

You can find the Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0 at the following address:

www.w3.org/TR/charmod/