Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Built-In Snippets

Many of Dreamweaver’s stock snippets offer solutions to problems you may never encounter, like a page footer containing two lists of links and a copyright notice. In addition, many use older design techniques (like tables to lay out content) that are best avoided. However, most web developers find at least a few snippets worth using. Here are some highlights:

• Close Window Button. When you create a pop-up window (Navigation Actions), this snippet lets you add a Close button to let people dismiss the window. The Close Window Button snippet (in the Form Elements folder) places a form button with the words “Close Window” on the window, complete with the JavaScript necessary to close the window when your visitor clicks the button.

• Dropdown Menus. If you create a lot of forms for your sites (see Chapter 12), you’ll find some useful snippets in the Form Elements folder, especially in the Dropdown Menus subfolder. For example, the “Numbers 1–12” snippet inserts a menu with the numbers 1–12 already coded into it—great for capturing credit card expiration dates on an e-commerce site. (To create an even more useful drop-down snippet, see the tutorial at the end of the chapter.)

• HTML Comments. You can use the Comment Multi-Line snippet (in the Comments folder) to “comment-out” or hide HTML. And this works in Design view, so just select the element you want to hide and apply this comment. This is a good if you want to temporarily hide some HTML—for example to test what a page ...