Neverside

Slicing?

Hey,
I know it sounds like a stupid question, but what's the point of slicing? When you export do you have to use tables? Can't you use divs instead?
I may be way off here, but is the point of slicing just to make certain images load up quicker on a slow modem?

Do web designers still slice? 'Cause when I tried slicing a certain section, the other sections of the image were also sliced (eg. rectangles surrounding the slice were sliced too automatically). Why?

I'm an aspiring web designer who wants to become as good as Robouk.
Thank you very much in advance.

Slicing was Adobe's noble attempt to bridge the gap between drawing a "layout" in Photoshop and a finished web site. A lot of people can draw a decent layout, fewer can code it, and even fewer machines can code it The idea was to spit out some basic HTML to get people started, they can add their own tweaks later.

To it's credit, you can output div's with Photoshop, they use absolute positioning (I think), and they're still missing the point of the web standards movement. :shrug: Bottom line is that Photoshop ain't a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and it shouldn't be.

Me, I don't slice. I copy and paste in small increments ? essentially what slicing does, but I get to revel in a built-from-scratch feeling when I do it manually. Call me old fashioned.

Your phantom slices automatically appear because they have to. Images, as files, have to be stored in a rectangular form with height and width; no L or any other crazy shapes.

Speaking of RoboUK, has anyone heard anything from him since 2002ish?

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Jon Culver Chia Pets

Sparky,
Your reply helped a lot. Thank you very much.
I have another question, if you don't mind.
Do you use divs with your small increments, or do you use tables? And yes, you can use relative and absolute positioning with divs.

I would kill to witness the presence of Robouk. I don't believe it, but he was last online 6 weeks ago on DeviantArt. I really wish that his website was back up. I frequented it daily back in 2002. It was the best. Man, those were the good old days.
Now I use http://www.web.archive.org/ to see the remnants left of him. That Wayback Machine is genius, although it doesn't show everything on a website, and PHP doesn't work either. I discovered it just a couple of weeks ago and it still amazes me.
Anyway, thanks for the help

Dave (AbsoluteCross) got some of RoboUK's tutorials and posted them on his site. Spoono has several of his old tutorials as well.

For blocks of things, I use div's, but you've also got to be sure to use more appropriate tags in different spots (images, lists, headlines, whatever beckons). Replace your div's and span's with more suitable, semantic tags when you can.

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Jon Culver Chia Pets

To add on to what Sparky said, you don't have to have Photoshop generate code. You can slice the images and save the images only, if you want.

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Do I then put the sliced images into divs and align them via CSS? 'Cause you can't align images (<img>) through pixels.

This is all great, thanks

Well that kind of depends on what you're doing with them. You may want to set them as the background as something (via CSS) or you might just use a standalone <img> depending on your application. Again, good meaningful markup is very important.

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Jon Culver Chia Pets