Chapter 6. Creating Custom Property Inspectors

The Property inspector is the most familiar of the Dreamweaver floating panels. You can use it to view the properties of selected HTML elements in your documents, and to add, remove, and change those properties. The Property inspector is actually many different Property inspectors, all of which appear in the same panel framework on users' screens. Depending on what the user has selected, or where the cursor is placed, Dreamweaver shows a different inspectorcreated from a different inspector filein the panel interface.

Several Property inspectors in Dreamweaver are built-in, coded into the program itself instead of being programmed as extensions. You can't access or alter their code. An example would be the default Property inspector for editing text. Other Property inspectors are written as extensions, using the standard HTML/JavaScript combination. Following the Application Programming Interface (API) requirements of these inspectors, you can create your own custom inspectors, and even tell Dreamweaver to use your inspectors instead of its own built-in alternatives. In this chapter, you learn how to do just that.