Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Edit Library Items

You’ll appreciate the real power of Library items when it’s time to make a change. When you update the file in the Library, all the pages that you’ve graced with that item update themselves, too.

Start by opening the Library, as described on page 522. Then:

1. Open the Library item that you want to edit.

   You can do this by double-clicking the Library item in the Assets panel, by highlighting it and then clicking the Edit button Figure 17-4), or by highlighting a Library item on a Web page and then clicking the Open button on the Property inspector (Figure 17-5). (You can also open the library item file—.lbi file—in the Library folder of your site’s root directly from the Site window.)

   Dreamweaver opens what looks like a miniature Web page document, containing nothing but the text, graphics, or other elements of the Library file.

POWER USERS’ CLINICUnder the Hood of Library Items

Behind the scenes, Dreamweaver stores the HTML for Library items in basic text files. Those files’ names end with the extension .lbi, and they stay in the Library folder inside your local site folder (page 429).

When you insert a Library item into a Web page, Dreamweaver inserts the item’s HTML and adds a set of comment tags. These tags refer to the original Library file and help Dreamweaver remember where the Library item begins and ends. For instance, if you turned the text “Copyright 2001” into a Library item called copyright and inserted it into a Web page, Dreamweaver would add the following ...