Relative Links in Macromedia Dreamweaver template
It seems that Dreamweaver has what almost appears like a bug. By changing one path in your template to Site Root it will change all template-related paths to Site Root throughout any page using that template. While this can be frustrating, there's also a fairly simple solution: Select an image in the template that has a link. Click on the Browse icon. At the bottom of...
Creating Custom Context Menus for MSHTML
The DEC already has methods available for creating a custom context menu but MSHTML doesn't. This code adds this nice functionality to MSHTML and does it in a way that is quite similar to the DEC samples that come from Microsoft. The approach to this process was to create an interface that was as close to the standard context menu that appears in the browser as well as the one that appears i...
ShowBorders property for MSHTML
For anybody who has developed a WYSIWYG editor using the DEC and has wanted to switch over to the MSHTML has had to deal with "missing" functionality. At first, I thought that this type of functionality would have been available but in doing a little research, there doesn't appear to be a property anywhere to be able to set that. So, I made my own! First, in the onload event of the editor I set t...
Making Usable and Accessible Forms
For anybody who has made a web site, you have likely needed to create a form. A form can be a pretty straightforward thing but did you know that you can make your forms easier to use but following a couple easy steps? Here is our first example: Username: Username: <input type="checkbox" name="chk1" value="true"> As you can see, it's a pretty straightforwar...
Creating a custom Find dialog for MSHTML
The find dialog functionality that comes with the DEC does the trick but if you've moved onto the MSHTML functionality in IE5+ or you want to change the interface in the DEC then you need something custom made. First, let's put together the code to open the find dialog: showModelessDialog( "find.html", window, "dialogWidth:385px; dialogHeight:165px; scroll:no; status:no; he...
TIPS, TRICKS & BOOKMARKS
I'm Jonathan Snook and I write about web design and development. I 






