Chapter 1. Dreamweaver UI

Dreamweaver's rich feature set makes it an indispensable tool for professional web developers. Its visual interface offers easy access to standard HTML objects such as tables and frames, plus prebuilt scripts and behaviors, timeline-based activities, CSS support, and a JavaScript debugger. For webmasters, Dreamweaver includes site-management tools such as File Check In/Check Out and Design Notes.

This book covers Dreamweaver's practical usage, including its site management features. Reference material from O'Reilly & Associates covering HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript is also included within the Dreamweaver 4 (DW4) Reference panel (Window Reference).

This chapter will familiarize you with Dreamweaver's Document window and some common elements you'll use within it. These topics will help orient those who are familiar with HTML or earlier versions of Dreamweaver, but may be new to Dreamweaver 4. Although you should plan your site before beginning serious production work, this chapter will help you perform quick edits on existing pages and get immediate hands-on experience. For those who prefer the "top-down" approach, refer to Part II, which covers site management.

Your use of Dreamweaver will rely heavily on the Dreamweaver user interface (UI) objects discussed in this chapter. Macromedia's documentation variously refers to Dreamweaver's UI components as panels , inspectors, editors, bars, windows, and palettes, and we follow those conventions when referring to them individually. For convenience, we use the term panels to refer to them collectively.

This chapter covers:

• The Document window in its various views, plus its Toolbar and status bar

• The Objects panel and its respective categories

• The Property inspector and its selection of options

• The Reference panel and its vast selection of HTML-, JavaScript-, and CSS-related information

• The Launcher bar used to access other Dreamweaver panels, such as the Behaviors, CSS Styles, HTML Styles, and Timelines panels.

In later chapters, we'll cover the interface options that control such things as tables, layers, frames, forms, markers, rulers, gridlines, and tracing images. With these options, Dreamweaver stands above other visual development tools.

Hidden contextual pop-up menus can be accessed using right-click on Windows or Ctrl-click on the Macintosh. Use this shortcut when the book tells you to choose an option from the contextual menu. These menus vary, depending on which window or object you click.