FrontPage 98 has a new "component:" Shared Borders. Now you can have something in common with the U.S. and Canada!
Actually, it's a pretty cool concept, and a logical extension of the "style" pages and included navigational and header files which you may be using currently in your FrontPage webs. But this goes a step further, and makes it even easier to implement. For example, I have some webs which use included pages as headers and navigational footers. But when I create a new page, I still have to insert these include components into the pages. With Shared Borders, you can let FrontPage do (almost) all of the work! All you have to do is create your "border" pages, and FrontPage puts them into all of your pages. In fact, you can specify that any given page doesn't have the Shared Borders, but by default, when you use Shared Borders, FrontPage will assume that any new page will use them. And if you're halfway through building your web, and decide you want these in your pages, FrontPage will oblige you, and automatically change all the pages in your web to use them.
Shall we have a look under the hood? To create Shared Borders for your web, just open it in FrontPage Explorer, and select Tools|Shared Borders from the menu. You will be shown the following dialog box:
You can select to have any combination of borders for your pages. FrontPage will generate the files, and place the include components in all of your pages. These four pages can include navigation bars, and/or any kind of styling you may want to use to spice up your web. The greatest advantage to using Shared Borders is that it gives your web a consistent appearance throughout.
To edit the border pages, just go to Navigation View, and look in the _borders folder. You will find Top.htm, Bottom.htm, Left.htm, and Right.htm in this folder, and you can edit them as you would any other page. FrontPage puts some text "cues" in these pages to help you get started.
For any individual page within the web, you can turn off any or all of the Shared Borders for that page only, or even customize that page to use its' own "non-Shared" Borders. Open the page in FrontPage Editor, and select Tools|Shared Borders from the menu. You will see the following dialog box:
If you select "Use Web Default" your page will include the borders which appear throughout the web, and you can select which ones will appear on the active page. If you select "Set for this page only," you can use unique borders which you customize for that individual page.
One last thing to remember: This is a FrontPage 98 component, and isn't available on servers without the FrontPage 98 extensions enabled.
Author: Kevin Spencer
Date: 12/12/97
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