Extending Freeway

Get More Power

Freeway produces clean and well ordered HTML code ‘out of the box’. But there are times when you may need to add raw code, or modify code, to achieve certain things, like for instance getting the site to validate against W3C rules and regulations.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Validation and standards compliancy aren’t the only things you need to extend Freeway for, but they’re good examples. Although validation in itself does not guarantee that your site is good looking or well functioning, it is something that more and more corporate and government buyers are looking at, along with accessibility. To some extent this has become an issue because of changes in how communications legislation is implemented, especially in countries like the US and Great Britain. The movement is there though, and once a ball gets rollling...

So, what do we do? How do we ‘extend’ Freeway? Well, in most cases it involves pressing a button. This button: When we press the button it brings up an input window where we can type in raw code. The neat thing about it is that the code we write in these dialogue windows is not overwritten by Freeway with the rest of the HTML. Of course, there’s a flip side to that coin: by using the Extend... feature to input code, we step out of the WYSIWYG mode. Whatever code we add is not visible in Freeway but only when we preview or publish the page to a browser. There’s also the added risk that we commit some error. But it’s worth it.

What are the rewards?

First of all, we gain control. Say we build a pretty page in Freeway and we’d like it to comply with W3C standards guidelines. So we send the page through the validator, which finds some errors that need to be fixed. Can we fix them? In some cases, yes; in some cases, no. At least not without extending the code.

Second, there are neat, graphic effects that can be accomplished through CSS. Dashed borders on a table cell for instance, or fake smallcaps for HTML text. These are things that we need to use the Extend... feature for.

Another upside to the feature is something that is often overlooked: the educational side. Once you start using the feature and realise just how much you can spruce up a site simply by adding a few lines of code here and there, it starts to challenge you. Because there’s no visual feedback, you need to know a little bit about what you’re trying to achieve—so you ask a few questions, you read through a few tutorials and suddenly this whole coding thing has become less fearful to you. You are starting to learn new tricks. (Wow!)

And then, there’s the dynamic site building aspect to consider. If you need to create e-commerce sites or database driven corporate sites, it’s very likely that you will need to include some code snippets, either prefabricated or stuff that you write yourself. The Extend... feature, along with Markup items and a few other things makes this ‘advanced’ sitebuilding a snap.

We will return to this, naturally. For now, here is a simple example of what you can do with the button.