Well, as you've noticed I'm still a bit behind in catching up around the office and posting new 3ds Max information to the blog. I've got excuses, of course.
For quite some time now I've been trying to clean up my website by redoing it with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) so that it looks better on a wider variety of screen resolutions. With my limited knowledge of HTML programming CSS has managed to baffle me completely. I just didn't seem to get what it was doing, nor how to adapt it to my website.
I recently saw a short article about Microsoft Expression Web Designer; a beta release of the Frontpage replacement software and decided to give it a try as it claimed to be CSS-based. After going through a few tutorials (they are limited) and not making much real progress, the light finally went on and I "got" what CSS was all about. I'm still not good at it but at least I get the concept, which makes it much easier.
The key concept as I see it is that you use the built-in styles and then modify those to meet your needs while maintaining a connection back to the original style. In 3ds Max terms it's sort of like making reference clones of reference clones so that when you pick anything in the chain it modifies everything downstream, but nothing upstream.
The software has a graphical layout with a split screen so you can see the HTML code and the really scary part of all this is that I find myself going up and editing the HTML code. Sheesh, I don't want to become a programmer. :-)
Click here if you're interested in downloading a copy of Expression and trying it out yourself.
Have fun
Ted
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