Thin Lines

[woodruth]

hi i have probably what is a really simple question but one that has annoyed me for awhile. What is the easiest way to create simple table dividing lines in dreamweaver. For example as you see breaking up the text at this site http://www.vqronline.org/. Are they images? Or is they a way to draw simple lines in dreamweaver.
The borders on this site too are really simple and clean. Is there an easy way to do this?
Any help you could give would be really great thanks...

[Waldo Jaquith]

I'm not sure if you're asking about the vertical or the horizontal lines, but we use different approaches for each. The vertical one is simply a 1px, full-height TD with a background color of that gray color. But the horizontal lines are even older-school HTML -- HRs -- made to look less beastly through the magic as CSS. Horizontal rules, by default, are shaded. I just tossed in some light CSS to assign the width, height, margin, and color. (HR colors are assigned, oddly enough, with background-color, not color.)

The entire site is a terrible mix of ancient, table-based layout (courtesy of our creaky old CMS built with PHP that has HTML coded within it, without a lick of CSS), so any styling has to be done through hacks like applying styles to HRs. We're moving to a new CMS, quite possibly Bricolage (http://www.bricolgage.cc/), in no small part so that we can move to a proper DIV-based layout.

HTH,
Waldo Jaquith
VQR Internet Evangelist

[Waldo Jaquith]

It occurs to me that I've failed to answer your question about Dreamweaver. I'm afraid I'm a vi/emacs/BBEdit kind of a guy, so I can't say a thing about Dreamweaver. But if Dreamweaver can handle the simple insert of an HR, it ought to be able to allow some light styling of that element.

Cheers,
Waldo

[Waldo Jaquith]

Hmm. My first post, in which I actually described how we do that on the website in question, is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps a moderator could pull it out of the queue in which it's apparently been sequestered?

Cheers,
Waldo

[woodruth]

dear waldo
so great of you to respond to me! i hope you dont think it was cheeky to link to your site. im a fan of the magzaine and the site design!
i like the simplicity and spacing.
the clarity of the layout is something ive actually found difficult to do in dreamweaver. thin lines is a problem and ive been reduced to using images everywhere. thanks for the response, im self taught and often these things slip by me.
im going to have a crack at employing both the vertical and horizontal lines and ill let you know how i get on!