Lesson 16. Editing the Code

You can gain more control over many of the elements on your Web pages after you become familiar with the code used to create those pages and how to edit that code or even write it from scratch (otherwise known as hand coding). Macromedia Dreamweaver does a great deal of work for you, saving you time by creating the code in the background while you visually design your pages. However, Dreamweaver is a great deal more than just a visual editor. It provides an extensive array of tools and resources for hand coding and code editing. These features enable advanced programmers to make precise modifications, troubleshoot their documents, and make use of the most recent progress in code developmenteven if those advances go beyond what is available in Dreamweaver.

In this lesson you will work directly with the code, using features such as snippets and the Quick Tag Editor to speed up the process.

The ability to introduce items that Dreamweaver might not recognize and the level of control that you have over the code makes for a very flexible program that you can use while staying up-to-date in the rapidly changing world of Web development. Even as a beginner, you can make use of these code features and use Dreamweaver's code tools and resources to learn about the code. You can use Dreamweaver to work with a variety of different programming languages including JavaScript, ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, XML, and more. In this lesson, you will work with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

In this lesson, you will learn to edit the code and make use of many of the tools that will enable you to create code by hand. This lesson is intended to give you a basic introduction to the extensive code-editing features available in Dreamweavera thorough and advanced exploration of these tools is outside the scope of this book.

To see examples of the finished pages for this chapter, open training.html and asana.html from the Lesson_16_Code/Completed/Training folder.