I currently use Adobe Dreamweaver for a lot of my repetitive tasks in web design. It’s a great tool for managing lots of files and links between them all but as with all the Adobe products it can be a little too helpful at times. For example it formats your HTML for you so it’s easy to read. When you try and make a simple table it makes all the indent so it’s easy to see where are all the headers and rows are etc. So a simple two row, two column table looks like this when created in Dreamweaver
This is great to see exactly where the second row is for example to change content in a table. For example if there is a listing of events and a client needs a date changed I can easily find it in the code and change it.
Then I had a unique problem is that one of my clients uses the content management system called Teamsite. I don’t know if it has to do with the way it’s set up or if this is the quirky nature of teamsite but none-the-less teamsite renders these white spaces in the code as extra paragraph tags. It shouldn’t matter if you have white spaces in your HTML code or not. The browser only reads the commands between the opening and closing tags of HTML. This is not so with teamsite. Once you paste in your HTML with the formatting above teamsite will change each line break a
tag and create many paragraphs where you didn’t want them. This “bug” as I call it creates unsightly gaps in your content.
To solve the problem above you must create one long continuous line of code with no line breaks for it to render the way you want. That means a bunch of manual edits and a lot of room for typos. After googling I found a great online resource called “textfixer”.
It turns out I am not alone in wanting my code to look like one long string with no breaks. Having all that nice formatting above can add bulk to the speed your web page load time. I really am not sure how true this is but anything that helps with speed I am all for but more importantly this web tool solves my problem of code formatting and cleans up any large blocks I want to clean up in other ways.
Now the above code looks like this:
Problem solved and in a fraction of the time that is usually needed! You must paste all of your code in the page for it to work though including the head content. In addition to “compressing” the HTML it also decompresses it so I can make all that stuff human readable again!
So go check out textfixer.com and see what other tools they have!
“When you begin viewing the world through a camera lens, your senses sharpen as your mind and eyes are forced to focus on people and things never before noticed or thought about. I discovered that even if I didn’t always take a picture, the simple act of carrying a camera and searching for something to photograph greatly sharpened my own powers of observation and allowed me to experience much more of life.” – Kent Reno
