Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Built-In Snippets

Most of Dreamweaver’s stock snippets offer solutions to problems you may never encounter, like a page footer with two lists of links and a copyright notice in it. In addition, many Dreamweaver snippets use older design techniques (like tables to lay out content) that are best avoided. However, most web developers find at least a few built-in snippets worth using. Here are some highlights:

• Close Window Button. When you create a pop-up window (Squish), this snippet lets you add a Close button to let people dismiss the window. The Close Window Button snippet (in the Form Elements folder) places a form button with the words “Close Window” on it, complete with the JavaScript necessary to close the window when your visitor clicks the button.

• Dropdown Menus. If you create a lot of forms for your sites (see Chapter 12), you’ll find some other useful snippets in the Form Elements folder, especially in the Dropdown Menus subfolder. For example, the “Numbers 1-12” snippet inserts a menu with the numbers 1 to 12 already coded into it—great for capturing credit card expiration dates on an e-commerce site. (To create an even more useful drop-down snippet, see the tutorial at the end of this chapter.)

• HTML Comments. You can use the Comment Multi-Line snippet (in the Comments folder) to “comment-out,” or hide, HTML. And this works in Design view, so just select the element you want to hide and apply this comment. This is a good way to temporarily hide some HTML—for example, to test ...