Chapter 7: "It's Better to Look Good than to Feel Good" (Building Better-Looking Pages)

The first thing any user notices when visiting pages you've designed is the overall appearance of your pages. In the past, people were impressed if you included images on your pages, but today the bar has been set a little higher: animations, sound and video are almost routine. Some sites even offer real-time video to visitors.

ActiveX has lots to offer if you'd like to enhance the appearance of your pages, including the many controls discussed in Chapter 7:

• Animated Button
• Chart
• Gradient
• Image
• Label
• New

Note
If you've made it this far without an ActiveX-enabled browser, you're at the end of the line. The examples in this chapter are exclusively ActiveX controls, and won't seem very impressive if your browser isn't ActiveX-capable.

What You Need

For this, chapter and most of the following chapters, you shouls have the Microsoft Control Pad installed on your system. To install Control Pad though, you must have the latest version of Internet Explorer. Here a shopping list of items:

• Internet Explorer
• Control Pad
• PageGen (for making crazy labels)

Where to Find the Controls

The ActiveX FAQ (at Microsoft's Web site) includes a table which tells you where you can find each of the free controls provided by Microsoft.

Chart control

The Chart control enables you to quickly and easily build graphs: you supply the data, and the Chart control makes even the worst news look pretty. An example of the Chart control in action shows a table with four different chart types displayed. You can open the example file in Control Pad, and change the various properties to achieve the look you want.

Gradient control

The Gradient control gradually fades from one color to another, which creates a nice visual effect. An example of the Gradient control shows several different effects you can achieve by changing the Dierction and Color properties. (You can see some other examples at Microsoft's page for the Gradient control, which includes reference info on the control and its properties.)

Image control

You can already include images in your HTML pages with the <IMG> tag to include both GIF and JPEG images inline (in most browsers). The Image control is a little fancier, and has support for more formats, including:

• GIF ('87 and '89, including transparent GIF's)
• JPEG
• WMF
• BMP (Windows bitmap)

Take a look at some examples of the Image control.

Label

Labels give you a fancy way to display text. You can achieve some interesting effects with the Label control, by rotating text and changing colors. The Label control really shines though when you use the PageGen utility to create text which is drawn between two curves.

New

The New contrl solved the sticky problem of highlighting recent additions without overdoing it, but Microsoft has recently removed the control from its site.