Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

HTML Styles

Adding formatting options to text can require many clicks of the mouse and many trips to the Property inspector. Suppose, for instance, that you want all of the major headings on a page to be formatted as Heading 1, using the Arial font, in red, italic, and centered. If your page has many headings, this could add up to a lot of formatting work.

To streamline such situations, use Dreamweaver’s HTML Style feature. HTML Styles provide a single-click method for applying multiple text formatting options.

Note

Bear in mind that HTML Styles are not an “official” Web technology like Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScript. They’re purely a Macromedia creation, a shortcut for completing multiple formatting tasks in one step.

The control center for HTML Styles is the HTML Styles panel. To open it, choose Window→ HTML Styles or press Ctrl+F11 (-F11). The panel lists all styles defined for the current site (see page 25 for full detail on creating sites in Dreamweaver) and lets you create, apply, edit, and delete HTML Styles.

Creating HTML Styles

You can create an HTML Style either by formatting some text by hand first, or from scratch.

Here’s how to create an HTML Style based on text you’ve already formatted:

1. Select the text.

   You can, if you like, create an HTML Style from scratch. But you save a lot of time by preformatting some text in your document, and then telling Dreamweaver to base ...