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Visual Basic Concepts

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Designing Pages for DHTML Applications

There are three ways you can create the user interface of your DHTML application:

Page Design: Visual Basic vs. HTML Editors

When you create pages in Visual Basic, you add HTML elements to the designer and arrange them on the page. You do not need to know any HTML tags to build a page in this way, because Visual Basic creates the tags and attributes for each element for you. This method of design is quick and easy and allows you to create functional pages without learning the details of HTML.

However, Visual Basic is not designed to be an advanced HTML editor and does not contain some of the features you will find in many HTML editors. For example, you cannot view the source code for your page, and you cannot easily work with advanced features such as animation. It is best to create your pages in Visual Basic when your application's user interface will be relatively simple and you do not want to work in the HTML source code.

If you are more familiar with HTML or you want to incorporate more advanced features into your pages, you should create your pages in an external editor and then import them into Visual Basic. Creating pages externally gives you several advantages:

  • You can use the editor of your choice, with any advanced features it includes. This may give you finer control over the appearance and layout of the page.

  • You can access the source code for the HTML page and perform fine-tuning that you cannot do in the page designer.

  • You can have a graphic designer or another person create the pages if you prefer not to create them yourself.

You can use a variety of external programs to create your HTML pages, including editors such as Microsoft FrontPage®, a word processing program such as Microsoft Word, or Notepad.

In addition to using Visual Basic or an external program to create your pages, you can use a combination of both methods. You can create the preliminary page layout in Visual Basic, then open the page in an editor to do any fine-tuning, or you can create the page in an editor and rearrange and fine-tune elements in Visual Basic.