Chapter 15. Editing Code

Dreamweaver is what's known as a WYSIWYG application; WYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get." Given Dreamweaver's strengths as a design tool, why would anyone ever want to bother looking at code, much less editing it?

Believe it or not, there are people who purchase Dreamweaver who then spend most of their time in Code view. There are a number of reasons why; some of the more common we hear are:

• "It's perfect for control freaks like me who just want to change that one character or move things one pixel."

• "I learned tags before good WYSIWYG editors existed, so it's faster for me to make changes this way."

• "There are things I can do this way that can't be done any other way in Dreamweaver."

These are all perfectly valid reasons to want to use Code view (and there are plenty of other reasons). If you haven't before, check it out. You might find that Code view works best for you, or that it's useful when you simply want to tweak one small thing on your page.