Chapter 13. Floating Panels

You can create any kind of floating panel or inspector without the size and layout limitations of Property inspectors.

Although a custom Property inspector should be your first choice for setting the properties of the current selection, custom floating panels offer more room and flexibility for displaying information about the entire document or multiple selections.

Custom floating panel files are HTML files that reside in the Configuration/Floaters folder inside the Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 application folder. The BODY section of a floating panel file contains an HTML form; event handlers that are attached to form elements can call JavaScript code that performs arbitrary edits to the current document.

Dreamweaver has several built-in floating panels that are accessible from the Window menu. (These built-in panels are part of the core Dreamweaver code and do not have corresponding floating panel files for them in the Configuration/Floaters folder.)

You can create custom panels and add them to the Window menu. For more information on adding items to the menu system, see Chapter 8, "Menus and Menu Commands," on page 181.

The following table lists the files you use to create a floating panel:

Path	File	Description
Configuration/Floaters/	panelname.htm	Specifies the text that appears in the title bar of the floating panel, defines the floating panel, and contains the required JavaScript functions.
Configuration/Menus/	menus.xml	Adds a command to a menu.