Back in November 2007, I wrote a post about using InDesign to craft visuals for website layouts. Since that posting, I have noted that a lot of traffic coming to my blog arrives from searches for ‘building websites using InDesign’ and related topics. On the back of all that traffic, I decided to look into the matter: can you really build a website using only InDesign?

The simple answer is no. At least not in InDesign CS2.

After many hours of research, and the Adobe InDesign CS2 Bible by Galen Gruman as my witness, I can definitively say that creating web pages directly from InDesign just isn’t possible. Gruman backs me up on this on page 688 of his Bible. Gruman writes that you could export XML from InDesign for import into Adobe GoLive. I’ve not tried that myself, but I can only imagine that coding horrors that might result.

But is it possible in CS3? That I don’t know as I only have CS2.

When Apple launched Safari for PC last year, I was excited to finally get to see that browser in action. As a PC user (yes, even as a graphic designer, I use PC’s; long story, that, so perhaps one for another day.) And whilst I really do enjoy using Safari (second only to Firefox), I do have one complaint. Why does Safari for Windows take so long to open?

Using my stop watch to calculate the time expired between when I double-clicked on the programme icon to when it became fully functional for browsing. Here are the results:

Firefox 3 = less than 2.0 seconds

Internet Explorer 7 = just about 2.0 seconds

Opera 9.51 = about 3.0 seconds

Lynx = less than 1.0 second

Safari for Windows = 5.0 seconds (quicker after the programme has been opened, closed and re-opened)

Sure enough, my method isn’t overly exact or scientific, but it’s good enough to clearly demonstrate that Safari takes a comparitively long time to open. I find this frustrating – it’s about the only bad thing I can say about Safari, but it’s enough to keep me from being tempted to switching from Firefox to Safari as the primary browser.

Recently, I had to update the code on a website that I made several years ago. The process included, among other tasks, converting all the <b> and <i> tags to <strong> and <em>. After playing around with the it for a while, I determined that the most efficient way to find and replace the old tags with the new ones was to do a search for b>, and then to replace it with a strong>.

By seaching for the b>, I avoided having to sift through all occassions of the letter b in the source code and content. The same would hold true for the <i> tag: simply search for i> and replace with em>