Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

The Actions, One by One

While events get the ball rolling, actions are, yes, where the action is. Whether it’s opening a 200 x 200 pixel browser window or slowly fading in a photograph, you’ll find an action for almost every interactivity need.

In some cases, alas, the actions aren’t very good. Dreamweaver CS5 is still saddled with behaviors that were created for (and haven’t been updated since) Dreamweaver 4. Although Spry Effects—part of the much newer Spry Framework discussed in the last chapter—offer a fresh set of behaviors to play with, Adobe has only weeded out a few behaviors that aren’t very useful or that don’t work well. This book makes clear which are the rotten eggs you want to steer clear of.

After you complete the steps required to set up an action as described on Applying Behaviors, Step by Step, the new action appears in the Behaviors panel, and your Web page is ready to test. At that point, you can click the behavior’s name in the Behaviors panel, where—by clicking the Events pop-up menu, as shown in Figure 14-1—you can change the event that triggers it.

Spry Effects

Spry Effects are a relatively new addition to Dreamweaver’s arsenal of behaviors. They first appeared in Dreamweaver CS3 and are sophisticated visual effects that can do things like highlight elements on a page, make a photo fade in, or shake an entire sidebar of information like an earthquake. They’re mostly eye candy and work well when you want to draw attention to an element on a page, or create a dramatic ...