Library Basics

Imagine this situation: You manage a relatively large website consisting of thousands of pages. At the bottom of each one sits a simple copyright notice: “Copyright My-BigCompany. We reserve all rights—national, international, commercial, noncommercial, and mineral—to the content contained on these pages.”

Each time you add another page to your site, you could retype the copyright message, but that invites both typographic errors and carpal tunnel syndrome. And if you must format this text, too, you’re in for even more work.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT: A Snippet of Caution

Snippets aren’t as smart as other features in Dreamweaver. While the program usually warns you before you make a mistake, it doesn’t make a peep if you incorrectly add a snippet.

For instance, when you use one of Dreamweaver’s Form snippets to add, say, a text field to a page, it doesn’t check to see if you’re really putting the snippet into a form. Therefore, it doesn’t let you know if you’re missing the required <form> tag, and it certainly doesn’t add the tag itself. Furthermore, if you’re working in Code view, Dreamweaver lets you add snippets to the <head> section of a page (or even outside the <html> tags altogether), which is useful for creating dynamic web pages that include server-side programming, but creates messy and invalid HTML in normal web pages.

Furthermore, snippets don’t take advantage of Dreamweaver’s site management features to keep track of links or paths to images. Suppose you create ...

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