Specifications
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CHAPTER 11
Property Inspectors
The Property inspector is perhaps the most familiar floating panel in the Dreamweaver interface. It is
indispensable for defining, reviewing, and changing the name, size, appearance, andother attributes
of the selection as well as for launching internal and external editors for the selected element.
Dreamweaver has several built-in interfaces for the Property inspector that let you set properties
for many standard HTML tags. These built-in inspectors are part of the core Dreamweaver code;
for this reason, you cannot find corresponding Property inspector files for them in the
Configuration folder. With custom Property inspector files, you can override these built-in
interfaces or create new ones to inspect custom tags.
Custom Property inspector files are HTML files that reside in the Configuration/Inspectors
folder inside the Dreamweaver application folder. Property inspector files must contain a
comment (in addition to the doctype comment for Dreamweaver MX) immediately preceding
the opening HTML tag in the following format:
<!-- tag:tagNameOrKeyword,priority:1to10,selection:¬
exactOrWithin,hline,vline, serverModel-->
<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM "-//Macromedia//DWExtension layout-engine5.0//pi">
where:
• tagNameOrKeyword is the tag to be inspected or one of the following keywords: *COMMENT*
(for comments),
*LOCKED* (for locked regions), or *ASP* (for ASP tags).
• 1to10 is the priority of the Property inspector file: 1 indicates that this inspector should be
used only when no others can inspect the selection;
10 indicates that this inspector takes
precedence over all others that can inspect the selection.
• exactOrWithin indicates whether the selection can be within the tag (within) or must exactly
contain the tag (
exact).
• hline (optional) indicates that a horizontal gray line should appear between the upper and
lower halves of the inspector in expanded mode.
• vline (optional) indicates that a vertical gray line should appear between the tag name field
and the rest of the properties in the inspector (see an HTML file in the Configuration/
Inspectors folder for an example).
• serverModel (optional) indicates the server model of the Property inspector. If the server
model of the Property inspector is not the same as the server model for the document, the
Property inspector is not used to display the properties of the current selection.
The following comment is appropriate for an inspector that is designed to inspect the
HAPPY tag:
<!-- tag:HAPPY, priority:8,selection:exact,hline,vline, ¬
serverModel:ASP -->