By making basic adjustments to Expression Web settings, your web creation
experience can be easier. To start, open Expression Web and go to Tools >
Page Editor Options. You will see the Page Editor Options dialog box.
Page Editor Options
General Tab
The screenshot shows how I have my settings in Expression Web. While your
mileage may vary, it is important that you have the following items checked:
Image 1: Page Editor General Tab
Automatically enclose form fields within a form
Use [strong] and [em] when using bold and italic toolbar buttons
Prompt for accessibility properties when inserting images
Line numbers
Highlight invalid HTML
Highlight incompatible HTML
Code Formatting Tab
While you may not think you will ever have to make any tweaks to your code,
the settings you make in Expression Web can make life much easier. The screenshot
shows how I have my settings in Expression Web. While your mileage may vary,
it is important that you have the following items checked:
Image 2: Page Editor Code Formatting Tab
Tag names are lowercase
Attribute names are lowercase
Use shorthand properties when generating styles
CSS Tab
Image 3: Page Editor CSS Tab
If you are new to the world of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), start out
by choosing "Auto Style Application".
How CSS is applied to various items can be set in this dialog box. I suggest
you set the first option to "Rule" and the rest of the items to "Classes".
Place a check in the box next to "Use width and height attributes
for images instead of CSS".
Authoring Tab
Today's web standards dictate that each web page have a "Doctype" declaration.
This bit of information tells the browser how to interpret the HTML coding on
the page. Without this Doctype, the browser will go into "Quirks"
mode and make its own best guess.
Image 4: Page Editor Authoring Tab
Set the Default Document Type to HTML
You can also choose to have the page extensions be either .html or .htm
Set the Document Type Declaration
to HTML 5.
Set the Schema version to CSS 3 or CSS 3 draft.
Font Families Tab
When you create a new page, Expression Web will automatically add some information
within the head tags. One of these items is the type of "encoding"
used to render the text.
Image 5: Page Editor Fonts Tab
Choose an appropriate Language Character set. I have mine set to Unicode
(UTF-8) which will suit for most general purposes.
You will most likely have your fonts set within your CSS file. If you
forget to set a font (or font-family), you can set your design view text so
that you will see something different. This is a quick visual clue that you
need to add a font-family to your external CSS file.
When you view your web page in Code view, you can set a font for that,
too. I like my code to be a fixed-width font set to Courier New with a font
size of 9px. You can set your own font size preferences larger, if necessary.
Changing the way Expression Web Opens
When Expression Web opens, the default is to NOT automatically open the last
web on which you were working. If this is different for you, you can turn this
option off.
Image 6: Open Last Web Option
Open Expression Web.
Click Tools > Application Options
Uncheck the "Open last website automatically when Expression Web
starts" option.
