Editing Library Items

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

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

  1. Open the Library item you want to edit.

    You can do this by double-clicking the Assets panel’s Library item, by highlighting it and then clicking the Edit button (Figure 19-4), or by highlighting a Library item on a web page, and then, in the Property inspector, clicking the Open button (Figure 19-5). (You can also open the Library item file—an .lbi file—in the Library folder of your site’s root directly from the Files panel.)

    Dreamweaver opens what looks like a normal web page, but it contains only the text, graphics, or other elements of the Library file.

    The selected Library item (an .lbi file) is in the site’s Library folder. (The path appears after the word “Src”.)

    Figure 19-5. The selected Library item (an .lbi file) is in the site’s Library folder. (The path appears after the word “Src”.)

  2. Edit away.

    A Library item is only a selection of HTML; it’s not a complete web page. That means you shouldn’t add page properties like the title or background color. (Dreamweaver actually lets you do this, but that adds invalid HTML code to the Library item as well as to every page that uses that Library item.) Also, you can insert Library items only in the body of a web page, so stick with objects that would normally appear in the document ...

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