[Optimizing GoLive for Lasso Programming] at tagSwap.net: Open Source Lasso Code

[Optimizing GoLive for Lasso Programming]

: Figure 1

The Browser Profiles list in Web Settings. Duplicate the Adobe GoLive profile, and rename it Adobe GoLive 72dpi.
: Figure 2

Double click the new 72dpi browser profile and edit the line that specifies the dpi.
: Figure 3

Locate and open the file default.aglfmi.
: Figure 4

Remove the phrase brackets="items" wherever it applies to Lasso file extensions (probably just las and lasso).
: Figure 5

Locate the .lasso and .las file mappings.
: Figure 6

Adjust the inspector settings to define the application you want to open that file type. Also, for LDML heavy pages, change the Basic setting to text so GoLive won't bother to check the syntax (it also breaks ties to the Site manager).
: Figure 7

The usual way that LDML looks in Layout in GL5, and in GL6 if you have edited the default.aglfmi file.
: Figure 8

The same code as figure 7 shown as source. Note the <noedit> container tags. Normally, this will hide the code inside a small blue tag marker in the Layout window. The inspector can be used view the contents of that marker (and the tabbing is kept intact which is nice).
: Figure 9

To customize how the noedit tag appears in the layout window, open the Markup tab of Web Settings, and locate the noedit entry.
: Figure 10

Open the inspector for the noedit tag and adjust the structure and content selections. As shown above, the display is just like figure 7.
: Figure 11

A customized display of the <noedit> tag with the tag content closed (set the structure popup to block).
: Figure 12

A customized display of the <noedit> tag with the tag content open. So far I can't find a way to have the display without the white space squished.

Greg Willits, September 15, 2002

These are some things I thought those of you using GoLive 5 and 6 and getting started with Lasso might find useful. I put this article together using GoLive 6 on OS X, but I did most of these same things when I used GL5 as well. So, most tips should apply to both versions.

These days I primarily use GoLive just to do visual layout of tables and mastheads and anything else that is layout oriented. I also use it for site management, FTP, CSS writing and other utilitarian things. GL5 was just fine for me, but 6 of course is OS X ready, and it finally has a better snippet system and better CSS tools--though still not as good as DW's :-(

Anyway, several things that GoLive does to manage its environment can be downright annoying for working with a lot of hand coded LDML.

Are all your fonts huge now?

GL6 uses 96 dpi instead of 72 dpi like it has through v5. You can adapt and update your font specs if you're not using CSS, you can make this a reason to start learning CSS, or you can tell GoLive to use 72 dpi again:

Select Edit > Web Settings > Browser Profiles (see figure 1). Duplicate the Adobe GoLive profile, and rename it Adobe GoLive 72dpi. Next, double-click the lock icon to open the source code for that profile (see figure 2). Look for the line that looks like this:

< var name="dpi" value="96"/ >

and change it to

< var name="dpi" value="72"/ >

Stop the character encoding dialog when you open a file

Preferences > Encodings > Checkbox OFF "Use Charset Info" at window bottom

Stop the blue boxes from encapsulating LDML code

Open this file in the GoLive folder > /settings/FileMappings/default.aglfmi (see figure 3). Do a search for the word 'brackets' and you'll see lines like this:

< map ext="lasso" mime="text/html" transfer="text" base="html" mac="TEXT/GoMk" brackets="items"/ >

Remove the entire phrase: brackets="items" from lasso and las entries. This was rewritten with the update 6.0.1 update, so I had to do it again. Each time you apply a bug fix update, you'll might have to redo this.

Have GoLive open certain files in BBEdit from the Site window

I use .lasso for Corral stub files, and .las for content files so that GoLive can be set to open LDML intensive stubs and includes with BBEdit when double clicked in the site manager, and still open HTML dominated content files with GoLive:

Open Edit > Web Settings > File Mappings > text/ (see figure 5). Scroll down and find the .lasso and .las entries. In the Inspector (see figure 6), change File Creator to R*ch, click the little folder button and find BBEdit in the dialog. Now to make another one for .inc files, highlight the 'lasso' entry and click the + button in the toolbar to duplicate the entry. Edit the entry to be 'inc' instead of 'lasso2' and click the folder and look for BBEdit again. You can leave the 'las' entry alone so they still open in GoLive.

Keeping your LDML source in indented format

There's a few things to do here. First and foremost, wherever you want your indented LDML to be left alone, do not edit it in Layout window. Go to the source window. I've edited this way in 4, 5, and 6 and I've managed to keep my HTML and my LDML happy. But, as soon as you press any key and sometimes even just click or scroll inside any LDML, bang -- it'll have all line feeds and tabs stripped out. Sometimes GL6 seems to leave returns alone, but it still wipes out tabs. Of course there's some places where it's just easier to edit in layout mode like inside table cells. That's fine, the formatting loss will only apply to the code in that cell.

Another thing you can do is use GoLive's <noedit> tags to prevent GoLive from rewriting certain sections of your source code. This allows you to use GoLive's rewrite source code command without it messing up your nice indented LDML. There's some options available to configure the display of <noedit> in the Layout window.

Open the Markup tab of Web Settings. Click HTML and scroll ot find the "noedit" entry (see figure 9). Open the inspector and change the Structure popup to "block" and the Content popup to "normal." With those settings, anything within the <noedit> tags will appear in a blue block as shown in figures 11 and 12.

Even when using the <noedit> tags, you still cannot edit the LDML code if you want to preserve your source code indentation. However, <noedit> will keep GoLive from changing that code. I also find noedit very useful when I have tables where colors and sizes and other parameters are supplied as LDML variables. GoLive can quite grumpy about that.

Link an external stylesheet inside content block file only during source editing

I use a statement like this at the top of Corral content snippets so that I can use GoLive's CSS tools. GoLive will see and use the link in layout mode, but when you run the code, Lasso will remove the link.

[if: false]< link rel="stylesheet" href="/site/css/stylesEditor.css" >[/if]

That's all I have for now. If you have any tips you'd like me to add, let me know.