Tip #6
Using the tag selector feature
When you pick font traits using the Property inspector, you are adding appropriate HTML coding to your document. When you are looking at your web document in the Document window (or Document panel), on the status bar at the bottom of the window there is a section to the left called the tag selector. As you click within your document, clicking in different parts of the page, the code for the particular (web) item or items for that section will appear in the tag selector area.
If you have applied font attributes, and you are using the MX release, you will see the tag <font> on the status bar. To change text which already has a FONT attribute already, for example, to take text that you made a size 4 and add a color to the same text, click on the <font> tag on the status bar. Then pick the other attributes from the Properties panel. This ensures that changes are made within the existing <font> tag, and results in cleaner HTML code.
However, if you are using the default CSS feature in the 2004 release, you won't see a reference to <font> in the tag selector area, as is shown below. You see instead references to the styles created by the program as you applied font traits. You can still click on that "code" to select the text affected by that code and make a change in the traits.
It is better to use the tag selector to select parts of your document, rather than the old "click-and-drag" method, which can also (by mistake) highlight other nearby codes and items. For example, if you wanted to add a color to text in italics, clicking on the <i> tag or the <em> tag cleanly selects that particular text.
As another example, if you wanted to quickly delete all of the text in a given document, if you click on the <body> tag at the front of the tag selector area, all of the contents of the document are selected and you can press the DEL key to erase everything (that is, everything in the body area of the document; the title tag would not be deleted).
We have not yet covered very many Dreamweaver features in the class, and each feature creates its own tags. But as additional ones are covered in future lessons, such as adding graphics or a horizontal line or particularly when we add tables, click in various parts of your document and notice the tag selector coding.
These tips are created as part of a class on Dreamweaver Basics