Managing Styles

Sometimes, instead of editing the properties of a style, you want to delete it and start over. Or you've come up with a way to better organize your Web site and you want to rename some styles according to your new system. Dreamweaver makes it easy to do both those things. It even lets you duplicate a style, so you can quickly create a new style that bears some similarities to one you've already built from scratch.

Deleting a Style

At some point, you may find you've created a style that you don't need after all. Maybe you redefined the HTML <code> tag and realize you haven't even used the tag in your site. There's no need to keep it around taking up precious space in the style sheet.

To delete a style, make sure the CSS Styles panel is open (Window → CSS Styles). Click the name of the style you wish to delete, and then click the Trash can at the bottom of the panel. You can also remove all of the styles in an internal style sheet (as well as the style sheet itself) by selecting the style sheet—indicated by "<style>" in the CSS Styles panel (see Figure B-10)—and clicking the Trash can. When you trash an external style sheet, you merely unlink it from the current document without actually deleting the .css file.

Some CSS properties can be condensed into a shorthand version. For example, the values for the background image, background-repeat, background-color, and background-position properties can be combined using the background property like this: background: #FFF url(images/bg.gif) norepeat left top;. Normally, Dreamweaver creates a style using each individual property name, rather than the shorthand version. You can change that from the CSS Style category of the Preferences window (choose Edit → Preferences in Windows or Dreamweaver → Preferences on the Mac).

Figure B-10. Some CSS properties can be condensed into a shorthand version. For example, the values for the background image, background-repeat, background-color, ...

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