Using a Full-Blown IDE in Java

Generator PDF-417 2d barcode in Java Using a Full-Blown IDE

Aptana Studio currently comes in two versions The Community Edition is free and open-source, and the Professional Edition has additional features I use the Community Edition throughout this book, as it has more than enough features for beginning Web developers

Aptana is a pretty great editor, but I recommend you change a few settings after you install it on your system

Aptana can be customized in a lot of ways For now, the only preferences you need to change are in the HTML editor Choose Windows Preferences, and in the Preferences dialog box, expand the Aptana link and select HTML Editor The dialog box looks like Figure 3-12

By default, Aptana saves files with the htm extension Because this is the extension normally used only by Microsoft servers, I prefer to save pages with html All Web pages in this book are stored with the html extension

Enter html in the Default Extension for New HTML Files (Prefix with ) field to make this change, if you wish

When you create a new Web page in Aptana, a basic template appears This is convenient, but it creates an HTML 40 doctype Open templatehtml in a normal text editor, copy it, and paste it to the provided text area, and your pages will all begin with the standard template

Aptana allows you to split the screen with your code in one panel and a browser view in another Every time you save your code, the browser view immediately updates This is a really good tool, especially for a beginner, because you can get very quick feedback on how your page looks In the Html Editor Mode section in the Preferences dialog box (see Figure 3-12), you can indicate whether you want the browser preview to be in a separate tab, in a horizontal split screen, or in a vertical split screen I use tabs because I like to see as much code as possible on-screen I switch to the preview tab when I need to see how the page looks to the browser

Understanding basic lists Creating unordered, ordered, and nested lists Building definition lists Building basic tables Using rowspan and colspan attributes

ou ll often need to present large amounts of information organized in some way, and XHTML has some wonderful tools to manage this task XHTML has three different kinds of lists and a powerful table structure for organizing the content of your page Figure out how these tools work, and you can manage complex information with ease

XHTML supports three types of lists Unordered lists generally contain bullet points They re used when the order of elements in the list isn t important Ordered lists usually have some kind of numeric counter preceding each list item, and definition lists contain terms and their definitions

All the list types in XHTML are closely related The simplest and most common kind of list is an unordered list

Look at the simple page shown in Figure 4-1 In addition to a couple of headers, it has a list of information The list of browsers has some interesting visual characteristics: The items are indented There s some extra space between the left margin and the beginning of each list item

The list elements have bullets That little dot in front of each item is a bullet Bullets are commonly used in unordered lists like this one Each item begins a new line When a list item is displayed, it s shown on a new line These characteristics help you see that you have a list, but they re all just default behavior Defining something as a list doesn t force it to look a particular way, but there is a default view that helps you see that these items are indeed part of a list It s important to remember the core idea of XHTML here You aren t really describing how things look, but what they mean As you discover various kinds of listing structures, you ll see that the browsers automatically change what appears on-screen to indicate the various kinds of lists You can change the appearance later when you figure out CSS, so don t get too tied up in the particular appearance of things For now, just recognize that HTML (and by extension, XHTML) can build lists and make sure you know how to use the various types