Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS4 Bible

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Part II

Designing and Crafting Basic Pages

A pseudo-element, on the other hand, gives you control over contextually defined page elements:

For example,

p:first-letter styles the first letter in every paragraph tag, enabling a drop-cap

design. Because of their specific nature, Dreamweaver does not display any pseudo-elements in the

Compound list. You can, however, enter your own—Dreamweaver does a fine job of rendering both

the

:first-letter and :first-line pseudo-elements.

Dreamweaver does not render the lesser-used pseudo-elements :before and :after in

the Design view, however they are displayed properly in Live view.

Descendants and other advanced selectors

Dreamweaver also enables you to enter some of the more advanced additions to the CSS selector pal-

ette through the Compound selector type.

One such selector is the descendant selector. Descendant selectors are contextual selectors because

they specify one tag within another. A descendant selector, for example, permits you to give para-

graphs within a table a different style than paragraphs outside a table. Similarly, text nested within

two blockquotes (giving the appearance of being indented two levels) can be given a different color,

font, and so on than text in a single blockquote.

For example, to style text within nested blockquotes, enter the following in the Compound field of

the New CSS Rule dialog box:

blockquote blockquote ...