SharePoint Designer comes with some default general application settings that define its behavior when it’s open. These settings can be controlled by the Application Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.11, which is accessible by choosing Tools ➪ Application Options. The Application Options dialog box has four tabs:
n General: Allows you to establish application startup options that check whether
SharePoint Designer is the default editor for Web pages and Office documents, toggle the SharePoint Designer status bar (displayed at the bottom of the SharePoint Designer inter-face), show warnings in the status bar for expired FrontPage Include components, etc.
n Configure Editors: This tab allows you to associate programs with various file extensions or change existing associations. You can also add, modify, or delete extensions.
n Reports View: Allows you to set some settings that apply to the site reports generated for Web pages by SharePoint Designer
n FTP: Allows you to choose whether a file extension is transferred via FTP in binary or ASCII format
FIGURE 4.11
The Application Options dialog box
The Page Editor Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.12, which can be accessed by choosing Tools ➪ Page Editor Options or via the Page Editor Options link in the New dialog box, is the interface that allows you to set master properties for a number of SharePoint Designer components and features. These properties include general settings for HTML tags, Code view options, picture and auto thumbnail settings, IntelliSense and code formatting options, CSS settings, etc. The Page Editor Options dialog box has several tabs:
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For more on page-editor options, see Chapters 6, 7, and 12.n General: This allows you to establish general settings for HTML tags and set spelling options and Code view options.
n Auto Thumbnail: This allows you to change the width, height, and border thickness of thumbnails created by SharePoint Designer during various picture operations.
n Default Fonts: This allows you to set the default font settings and the fonts for text dis-play in the Design and Code views of SharePoint Designer. The font settings here for the Design view don’t actually apply to the text of the Web page. While the preview on the page in Design view uses the font settings you make here, the actual page text uses the font specified using text formatting via HTML, CSS, etc. For example, if you set the default font to Calibri, the portion of text that has Verdana applied to it in the HTML code is displayed in the Design view in Verdana. However, a portion of text that has no HTML, CSS, etc., applied to it is shown in Calibri.
FIGURE 4.12
The Page Editor Options dialog box
n Code Formatting: This allows you to set a number of options for the Code view of SharePoint Designer.
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For more on code formatting, see Chapter 6.n CSS: This allows you to set how CSS styles are applied to the various HTML tags.
n Color Coding: Settings in this tab allow you to specify the colors used to indicate various SharePoint Designer components in the Design view. Also, you can set colors to differen-tiate code in the Code view. While the default settings here usually work best, you can change settings in case you’re accustomed to a different set of code colors.
n Authoring: This allows you to set default new document types for non-SharePoint and SharePoint sites. Also, you can set the document type declaration, Internet Explorer and CSS schemas to be used for IntelliSense, auto code completion, and indicating errors in code.
n Picture: This provides the interface for setting default file types for pictures and picture conversion.
n Code Snippets: This allows you to add or remove code snippets. Code snippets is a fea-ture offered by SharePoint Designer that allows you to quickly add frequently used code pieces to the code of the Web page.
n Ruler and Grid: This can be used to specify settings for rulers and grids in the Design view.
n IntelliSense: This provides settings for auto code completions and code hyperlinks for the SharePoint Designer Code view.
n Font Families: This allows you to add fonts and create font families.
These options are discussed throughout the rest of this book.
Summary
By the end of this chapter, you have seen SharePoint Designer enough to be familiar with the lay-out and placement of the various features. What makes this interface so easy is that most of the functionality is easily accessible by using task panes and toolbars. As you work more with SharePoint Designer, you start remembering shortcuts that make it even simpler to use. Have you already figured out that pressing Ctrl+N creates a new page and opens it in one of the views? More such shortcuts follow throughout the rest of this book.
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n this chapter, I elaborate on Web page design and development. This chapter focuses primarily on Web page development by using HTML technology.The default Web pages that come with SharePoint sites use a variety of com-plex page design and development technologies. To avoid overload, I use non-SharePoint sites to discuss Web page design and formatting concepts.
Once you understand these basic concepts, you can apply them to
SharePoint Web pages with relative ease. Although profound discussion on HTML is beyond the scope of this text, I introduce you to some basic HTML concepts and tags as you move along and design HTML Web pages by using SharePoint Designer tools and features. Also, many page-formatting features of SharePoint Designer rely heavily on CSS. I also discuss the SharePoint Designer no-code implementation of such features.
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For more on Web page development by using DHTML and ASP.NET 2.0, see Chapters 8 and Chapter 10. For more on internal CSS implementation, see Chapter 12.HTML is the principal language for developing Web pages. Even if you use a server-side script, such as ASP.NET, to write the actual code of your Web page, the code that a browser renders is always HTML. HTML provides its features through a number of tags that you can set attributes for to define your usage. For example, the <a> tag is used to create a hyperlink, and the HREF attribute of the <a> tag is used to define the location of the hyperlink.
SharePoint Designer allows you to implement many of the commonly used formatting techniques without having to write or understand the HTML cod-ing that goes with it.