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Part VII
Extending Dreamweaver
Working with Custom Tags
With the advent of XML—in which no standard tags exist—the capability to handle custom tags is
essential in a Web authoring tool. Dreamweaver incorporates this capability through its third-party
tag feature. After you’ve defined a third-party tag, Dreamweaver displays it in the Document win-
dow by highlighting its content, inserting a user-defined icon, or doing neither depending on the
Preferences selected and the attributes assigned. Third-party tags are easily selected through the Tag
Selector below the Document window; therefore, they are easy to cut, copy and paste, or otherwise
manipulate. Perhaps most important, after a third-party tag is defined, you can apply a custom Prop-
erty inspector that enables tag attributes to be entered in a standardized user interface.
Third-party tags can be defined directly within Dreamweaver. Just as object files use HTML to struc-
ture HTML code for easy insertion, Dreamweaver uses XML to make an XML definition for the cus-
tom tag. A custom tag declaration consists solely of one tag,
<tagspec>, with up to seven attributes.
The following list describes all of the tag’s legal attributes:
tag_name
■■
—Defines the name of the tag as used in the markup. Any valid name—no
spaces or special characters are allowed—is possible. A tag with the attribute
tag_
name=”invoice”
is entered in the doc ...