User Guide

217

CHAPTER 12

Property Inspectors

The Property inspector is perhaps the most familiar floating panel in the Macromedia

Dreamweaver MX 2004 interface. It is indispensable for defining, reviewing, and changing the

name, size, appearance, and other 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. Custom Property inspector files let you 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) immediately

preceding the opening HTML tag, as shown in the following example:

<!-- tag:tagNameOrKeyword,priority:1to10,selection:¬

exactOrWithin,hline,vline, serverModel-->

<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM "-//Macromedia//DWExtension layout-engine5.0//pi">

This comment has the following elements:

• The tagNameOrKeyword element is the tag to be inspected or one of the following keywords:

*COMMENT* (for comments), *LOCKED* (for locked regions), or *ASP* (for ASP tags).

• The 1to10 element 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.

• The exactOrWithin element indicates whether the selection can be within the tag (within)

or must exactly contain the tag (

exact).

• The hline element (optional) indicates that a horizontal gray line should appear between the

upper and lower halves of the inspector in expanded mode.

• The vline element (optional) indicates that a vertical gray line should appear between the tag

name field and the rest of the properties in the inspector (for an example, see an HTML file in

the Configuration/Inspectors folder).

• The serverModel element (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, Dreamweaver does not use the Property inspector to display the properties of the

current selection.