Problem making web images with Illustrator

Question

I'm in OSX 4.11 and am having problems getting Illustrator html files to show up on a web page. The file contents seem to disappear in uploading via CyberDuck FTP client.
Can anyone confirm that Illustrator can be used in this way please?

Answer 1

> To to be clear James are you saying start with XHTML, and after that take on Dreamweaver?
Yes. I'm saying just get a book on basic XHTML and CSS. (The two go hand-in-hand.) While you learn basic coding, you'll be building perfectly functional web pages. When (if) you then feel you want to use a WYSIWYG web page editor anyway, you'll have a much better understanding of what Dreamweaver is doing for you.
> is there an actual XHTML programme that I should use?
No. And yes. You can use just about any program; probably a half-dozen or more that are already on your computer. You don't need to buy anything (except the book).
Just think of XHTML as a more up-to-date version of HTML. XHTML, like HTML, is just text. You can create and edit your web page code in any of these programs:
* Any of a plethora of WYSIWYG web page editors (Dreamweaver is one) which are designed to put a point-and-click interface on the process of building web pages.
* The source code window usually built into WYSIWYG page editors. (Dreamweaver has one.)
* Any of a plethora of glorified text editors with convenience features designed to enhance coding (such as auto-highlighting of tags).
* Any ordinary text editor that can save plain text.
* Any word processor that can save plain text.
Whatever book you buy will probably tell you to use a text editor you already have, or will point you to a free download, or will include one (if it's one of those books that come with a disk).
Just for the sake of understanding, do these two exercises:
1. You're looking at a web page right now. Find the View Source command somewhere in the main menu of your web browser and select it. A separate window will probably open up (IE on Windows opens NotePad), showing you the HTML code of the page. Now, all that gobbletygook looks intimidating, right? Not to worry. Somewhere in there after all that header stuff is a "body" tag. Somewhere near the bottom is its closing "body" tag.
2. Now go to this page and do the same thing:
WhyScriptAI.htm
You still see some gobbletygook, but not as much of it, right? That page (along with the others it links to) was written in nothing more complicated than Windows Notepad. (Like Mac SimpleText, if MacOS still has that.) It's certainly not a complex page. It's XHTML compliant. There are no tables, no slices. It references a separate CSS file for the styling, and uses a "div" tag to separate the "menu sidebar". But it's way more involved than would be necessary for the simple things you have so far described wanting to do, yet it and its CSS file were written in an ordinary text editor.
Now for exercise two:
1. Launch Illustrator and open a new blank document. Don't draw anything; just open a blank document.
2. Save For Web. (Yes, we're going to save a blank document.) In the Save As dialog, select HTML only. Save the file wherever you want on your computer.
3. Open the file with your web browser. Use the View Source command (or just open the file with any text editor), and you'll see something like this:
The background of the image above is the "blank" web page exported from AI, as it appears in a browser. The NotePad window is all of its source code. Much simpler, huh?
Note that the page displays a missing image. That's a default slice that AI inserts, even if there's no content in the document. Its code is highlighted in my screenshot. It's the only thing between the body tags of the source code.
4. Delete the highlighted text and replace it with "I wrote this." Save the file.
5. Go back to your web browser and refresh the view:
So now let's go back to your original problem of trying to put a simple mailto link on an HTML page that was exported from Illustrator. To do that, all you need to know is the HTML syntax for a mailto tag. Instead of typing "I wrote this", type a tag like this:
See how simple that is? No mucking around with slices in AI; no trying to find the point-and-click commands for a mailto link in Dreamweaver's interface. But moreover, you now understand what's actually going on, regardless of
whatever WYSIWYG web editing program you end up using (if any).
> Also I have got CS3 but would I be better off using DW in CS4 do you think?
Doesn't matter. You don't need CS4 to learn your way around Dreamweaver, and you don't need Dreamweaver at all to build fairly simple web pages. You could still use PageMill 1.0 if you had a machine to run it on. HTML is not rocket science. It's just a tags-based markup language. Honestly, if you just learn the basics, you'll probably enjoy it. Concentrate on that and then you'll know when and if you need to use a program like Dreamweaver, and why. Use whatever version of Dreamweaver (or whatever) you want when the design of your pages becomes complex enough that you feel you have a need for it.
JET