how best to convert my HTML pages to CSS?

[usanyou]

My apologies in advance if this went through twice ...



I have a feeling this will be a stupid question, but ..

I've spent considerable time building a content website using Frontpage. While it isn't the pillar of quality that I aspire to, as a newbie I'm mostly pleased with how it's taking shape. I hope to keep it online for a while and improve on it until I'm totally happy with it.

So-o .. I'm in the process of learning CSS and (here comes the stupid question) ... am curious whether there might be some kind of application out there that i can just "plug in" my html pages as-is and maybe somehow end up with a CSS version that i can edit.

Or ... do i have to re-write everything from scratch?
(would like to start using Dreamweaver.)


thx for not laughing too loud ...

[kram 2.0]

Keep in mind that you *can* edit the HTML through Frontpage. If you've already coded a page through FP, use either Notepad or FP's HTML interface to add CSS as needed. Last I checked, FP does not use CSS - at least not standard CSS. You can either do it externally (make a .css file, put the code in there, and link it from your original page(s)), or put the entire CSS embeded between the head tags.

I do recommend exploring Dreamweaver, though it is on the expensive side. Dreaweaver's WYSIWYG interface is pretty good and in addition, it codes fairly clean HTML.

kram

[usanyou]

hi kram,

thx for the reply ... altho i was actually hoping to know whether i could take my FP pages and import them into Dreamweaver and re-edit them there.

that is, if i add CSS content, will Dreamweaver automatically clean up extraneous FP code? ... or wll i have to do this myself, line for line? ....

thx again ...

[kram 2.0]

Dreamweaver will not cleanup FP's extraneous code automatically - that, you can do by hand. In terms of using Dreamweaver, you can simply access the .htm or .html file that you created with FP. Some of the more current versions will allow you to program CSS into the .htm file in the Dreamweaver interface, though it is definately something worth learning.

kram

[usanyou]

well ..... that's not what i was hoping to hear!

That's enough to take all of the fun out of it!!!

So-o-o ... all those font tags et al i have to replace one-by-one ... and re-create with CSS?

[rspassey]

You actually are removing most of the attributes that contribute to formatting your text, images, tables, etc. and cleaning it all up with CSS. It is a very much needed skill in building an always changing website, especially with dynamic content.

It make take a while to get the site looking the way you want it with CSS, having not had any experience with it before, but it will, in the end, reduce the amount of HTML you need to type out.

In regards to there being a program that does CSS for you, I have never heard of such a thing and I doubt one would be very accurate.

[mairving]

I can't remember if DW still ships with Homesite. You could do it pretty easily in Homesite. Just use replace. So in the HTML, you would first do a replace for
</font> to replace all of the closing font tags. Then you would do another replace to replace all of the opening font tags. You would have to be a bit more selective on this. For most font tags you would just replace it with a blank and let you stylesheet control the default format. For those font tags that are colored or larger, you could replace those with spans, strong, em or header. It wouldn't take all that long doing it this way. So if you had something like this:
<font color="red">Important</font> with
<span class="red">Important</span> (assuming that you have a class called red)