Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Adding an AP Element to Your Page

In most cases, the <div> tags you’ll position will have a variety of HTML elements—images, paragraphs, headlines, and so on. For example, to place a series of links at the top of a page, you could wrap those links in a <div> tag and position that div. In this case, you can use the Insert Div Tag tool discussed on The Insert Div Tag Tool. Start out by selecting existing content, or just click where you want to add a new absolutely positioned div. Either way, you either need to create a class or ID style first (with the positioning properties discussed above), and then select that style from the Class or ID menu of the Insert Div Tag window; alternatively, you can create the class or ID style by clicking the New CSS Style button in the Insert Div Tag window (see Figure 9-6).

But absolute positioning isn’t just for <div> tags; any HTML tag—forms, paragraphs, headlines and images—can be positioned absolutely. You just need to create a style and set the Position property to Absolute (The CSS Positioning Properties), and, voila, you have an absolutely positioned element.

Note

Dreamweaver includes some other tools for working with what the program calls “AP Divs.” But you should avoid both the Draw AP Div tool and the Insert AP Div command (Insert→Layout Objects→AP Div). These tools create internal CSS style sheets, along with less-than-obvious ID names. In addition, you can’t control where in the page these tools dump the HTML they create. Another tool to ...