Dreamweaver in a Nutshell

Styles

Now that we’ve seen where styles are stored, let’s look at styles themselves in more detail. A style is a formatting rule that can be applied to an item, such as text, an image, or a table. For example, you can define a style that uses 14-pt, blue, Helvetica text and apply it to all your subheadings. As usual, Dreamweaver provides a friendly UI for defining styles. You can open the New Style dialog box, where you’ll begin the process of adding a new style, by using Text → CSS Styles → New Style. You will need to make your Type selection in this dialog box first because it affects the dialog box’s other fields. Figure 10-5 shows three variations of the New Style dialog box—Make Custom Style (class), Redefine HTML Tag, and Use CSS selector—based on the Type radio button selection.

Figure 10-5. Using the New Style dialog box

Tip

All possible CSS style types can be stored in both embedded and external stylesheets. Use the This Document Only radio button (see Figure 10-5) to add a style to the embedded stylesheet; otherwise, pick a new or existing external stylesheet to hold the new style you’ll be defining.

Only custom styles created using the Make Custom Style (class) option appear in the CSS Styles panel (see Figure 10-15). These styles are called class selectors and also appear under the Text → CSS Styles menu. The styles that redefine HTML tags and other CSS Selectors appear ...