Examining Your CSS in the Styles Panel
As you read in Chapters 4 and 5, inheritance and the cascade are two very important CSS concepts. Inheritance provides a way of passing on common properties like a font color to descendents of a styled tag. Giving the page's <body> tag a font color, causes other tags inside the page to use (inherit) that same font color. The cascade is a set of rules for determining what a Web browser should do if multiple styles apply to the same tag and there are conflicts between the two styles. The cascade helps decide what to do when one style dictates that a particular paragraph should be displayed in 24-pixel type, while another style dictates that the type should be 36 pixels tall.
Current Selection Mode
With all this inheritance and cascading going on, it's very easy for styles to collide in unpredictable ways. To help you discern how styles interact and ferret out possible style conflicts, Dreamweaver 8 includes another view of the CSS Styles Panel (see Figure B-13). When you click the Current button, the panel switches to Current Selection mode, which provides insight into how a selected item on a page—an image, a paragraph, a table—is affected by inherited styles.
Tip
You can also switch the CSS Styles Panel into Current Selection mode by selecting text on a page, and then clicking the new CSS button on the Property inspector. Doing so also opens the CSS panel, if it's closed—a nice shortcut. If the button's grayed out, then you're already in the ...
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