Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 13. Spry: Creating Interactive Web Pages

As a web designer, you can count on one thing: The Web is always changing. Yesterday’s technology is yesterday’s news—remember Java applets, frames, and messages that scroll in your browser’s status bar (if you don’t, you’re lucky!)? You can see the most recent web design innovations on sites like Google Maps, Flickr, and Facebook, all of which offer a high degree of interactivity without resorting to multimedia plug-ins like Flash. Google Maps, for example, lets you zoom in, zoom out, and scroll across a map of the world without loading a new web page for each view. Many of the most cutting-edge websites almost feel like the kinds of complex programs you run right on your computer.

JavaScript—which has grown from a simple little language that helped create pop-up windows and image rollovers to a full-blown programming tool that can change the content of a web page as you look at it—is the key to this interactivity. JavaScript can even update a page with new data that gets downloaded behind the scenes (that’s why you can scroll to new sections of that Google map without loading new pages). Dreamweaver, which has always tried to provide tools to meet web designers’ current needs, includes a set of JavaScript tools that let you add interactive page elements like drop-down navigation menus, tabbed panels, pop-up tooltips, and data-driven, sortable tables. That’s what this chapter is all about.