Forms are common on a wide variety of websites and it’s important that they’re well designed and laid-out. There are many tools and extensions to help with this and one I came across recently is a free CSS form designer extension for Dreamweaver from DMXzone.
It allows you to create forms visually, using a simple drag and drop interface and a variety of CSS styles. It’s very useful for creating short simple forms and allows you to populate fields with default values such as days of the week or with dynamic values from a Dreamweaver record set.
There are however, a few things that could be improved with this extension. Firstly, the HTML mark-up isn’t 100% accessible as labels aren’t properly assigned to checkboxes and radio buttons (they have been implemented following an out-of-date w3c recommendation). It would also be difficult to manage a form with a complex layout with this extension, as the HTML mark-up is not really flexible and when new field elements are added, they’re automatically added at the end of the form (not within context) and have to be dragged and dropped into position. Also, the CSS produced by this tool isn’t cross-browser compatible.
So in summary, this is a useful free tool for creating short, simple forms, but to really be suitable for longer, more complex forms, the extension requires a few modifications. You can try it yourself by downloading the CSS form designer extension for free from DMXzone.
The net panel - amongst other things it ensures you aren’t referencing any missing files plus checking things aren’t taking too long to load. Great for making sure you haven’t referenced any old files and that everything is neat and tidy.
The lovely layout panel - more obvious but so useful. Just inspect an item and it’s margin, border, padding are shown as a box model diagram! Brilliant.