FPX Interface

Title Bar

There is nothing exciting about the FPX Title Bar. It shows the path to the current document and has the normal window buttons at the right: Minimize, Maximize, Close.

Menu Bar

 The Menu Bar has a number of menus which look familiar. Your most common actions are usually on toolbar buttons also. There are a few commands that you will use often that are available only on the menu.

HTML...
 View  |  HTML...  opens a new window that shows the HTML code for your page.

Open documents list
If your document is maximized in the FPX window, it hides all other open documents. In FPX  open the Window menu to see what documents are currently open. The one that is visible has a checkmark by its name.

You may not be used to this behavior since most newer programs either show a tab for each open document or give each one an icon on the Windows Taskbar.

You can rotate through the various open documents with the key combo CTRL + F6.

Formatting Bar

Buttons on the Formatting Bar apply HTML code to selected text to create their effects. You do not have as many choices as you may be used to seeing in other programs, like Word.

The Style button lists only HTML block elements like headings, paragraphs, and list parts. You cannot create your own styles here.
The Font Size buttons merely raise and lower the font size compared to the default size in the browser viewing the page. They do not set exact point sizes.

Standard Bar

It also includes browser buttons and two that you might not have seen before :

Back, Forward, Refresh, Stop.

WebBot for inserting special components

Hyperlink for turning text or an image into a link.

Forms Bar

The Forms Bar contains buttons that create the various parts of a web form. Forms are considered advanced HTML and so you will not be creating forms in HTML Basics.

How forms work is covered in Browser Basics: Techniques: Navigate a form and Browser Basics: Forms

Status Bar

 The Status Bar does not have too much on it in FPX.

Message area:  Shows the URL of a hyperlink or browser messages. [See Browser Basics: IE Statusbar for more on the various browser messages you might see.]

Download time:  When you are creating or editing a page on your hard disk, the Download time is an estimate of how long it will take for a browser to download the current page on a 28.8 modem. When you download a page from a web site to edit it, the time is the actual time it took to download the page and its images.

NumLock:  NUM shows whether NumLock is on or not. NumLock controls the numeric keypad at the right of your keyboard. When NumLock is on, pressing these keys produces numbers. When NumLock is off, the keys act as navigation keys.

Document

 A document in FPX shows its text as it will look in a browser. To help you see what is going on FPX includes special marks for line breaks, hidden comments, JavaScript, and   code that FPX does not understand. Dotted lines outline table cells.

FPX uses a lot of extra spacing in its display, so the page is not really going to look the way FPX shows it. This is more of a Design view than it is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view.

If you compare the illustration above with the actual page at the beginning of these lessons, you will see that the fonts are not right in FPX. Formatting for the page is set with a stylesheet. FPX does not understand CSS and so uses the default fonts.

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