Dreamweaver in a Nutshell

Chapter 7. Managing HTML Documents

In the preceding chapter, we discussed ways to manage your entire site, including links between documents. Let’s focus now on managing individual HTML documents. Although Dreamweaver automatically creates HTML for you, you can edit the HTML manually to add attributes not directly supported by Dreamweaver and to gain precise control over your document. Dreamweaver can automatically clean up your HTML code by removing empty tags, redundant tags, and nonstandard HTML.

This chapter covers HTML document management, including the following topics:

• Cleaning up sloppy HTML

• Using the History panel to review changes and record commands

• Using Find and Replace, the Quick Tag Editor, and spell checker

• Checking browser compatibility

Cleaning Up Your HTML Code

Clean HTML code is one sign of a conscientious HTML developer. No matter which tools you used to create your original HTML document, Dreamweaver can be used to clean it up and ensure compliance with HTML 4 standards. Although Dreamweaver features so-called Roundtrip HTML, it will rewrite HTML code when opening documents according to the settings under Edit → Preferences → Code Rewriting. You can hand-edit your HTML in the Document window’s Code pane (View → Code) or in the Code inspector (Window → Code Inspector or F10).

Clean Up HTML

Although Dreamweaver’s visual paradigm makes it easy to edit your page, it can also lead to duplicate tags and empty tags. Thankfully, Dreamweaver can automatically find and fix ...