Expression Web's new Snapshot panel and SuperPreview features make tracking down rendering problems easier.
One of the biggest challenges facing Web designers is making sure that pages render correctly across multiple browsers. For years, the recommended way of doing that was to install several different browsers and preview pages in each browser to ensure that everything looks okay. There are problems with this approach. First of all, different versions of Internet Explorer can render a page dramatically different, and installing multiple IE versions on a single machine isn’t a trivial task, assuming you can get it to work at all. Secondly, once it is discovered that a page renders incorrectly, identifying the cause of such problems is often very difficult.
Expression Web 3 introduces two major new features designed to help in this scenario; the Snapshot panel and SuperPreview. These are arguably the coolest new features in Expression Web 3. The Snapshot panel makes it quick and easy to see a preview of a page as it appears in Internet Explorer 6 as well as your installed version of IE. It will also let you see what a page looks like in Firefox if Firefox is installed.
The Snapshot panel’s preview is not an approximation. It is an accurate rendering of the page using the selected browser’s rendering engine. If you discover a problem, it’s time to step up to the Snapshot panel’s big brother, SuperPreview. SuperPreview makes the same rendering preview possible, but it adds the ability to preview in two different browsers side-by-side, and it also adds additional features such as a DOM inspector, highlighting, and much more.
SuperPreview makes it much easier to identify the cause of rendering differences. In fact, it’s such a powerful tool for Web designers that Microsoft made a standalone version of it available for free. The standalone version doesn’t allow for previewing in Firefox, but it will make it possible for Web designers to see a rendering of pages from IE 6 and other versions of Internet Explorer. If you need previews using Firefox as well, you’ll want to get Expression Web 3 because it incorporates the full version of SuperPreview.
You can find much more information on using SuperPreview by checking out the videos on Microsoft’s Expression site. You can also download a sample site so that you can work along with the demo.
