Do you use Dreamweaver for building web pages? One of the most annoying features of the last two Macromedia, and the first Adobe, release(s) of Dreamweaver was the way in which the program’s Properties Inspector encouraged inexperienced users to create CSS styles in a very random manner. This was due to the presence of style formatting options on the Properties inspector such as colour and size. Users would simply select a piece of text and use these options to format it. This would cause the program to create a class style with a default name of “style1″, “style2″, etc.

The latest version of Dreamweaver has fixed this problem by dividing the Properties Inspector into two sections: one for HTML structural options and the other for CSS stylistic options. The first option in the CSS section is “Targeted Rule”. This drop-down menu contains options for creating a new CSS rule and applying or removing an existing rule.

In fact, the “Targeted Rule” drop-down provides two methods of defining a CSS rule: “New CSS Rule” displays the New CSS Rule dialog box; “New Inline Style” adds an inline CSS style to the highlighted text. In both cases, the Font, size and colour of the new style can be modified right there in the Properties Inspector. To modify other attributes, simply click on the “Edit Style” button to display the CSS Rule Definition dialog box. Alternatively, you can click on “CSS Panel” to open the CSS panel in Current view, enabling you to specify attributes for your CSS rule directly in the CSS panel.

The Font drop-down menu in the CSS Properties Inspector contains a list of font lists rather than a series of individual fonts; for example “Impact, Arial Black, Arial, sans-serif”. This means that if the Impact font is not present, Arial Black will be used; if Arial Black is not present, plain old Arial will be used; and, in the unlikely event that none of them are present, the default sans-serif font on that user’s browser will be used. The font drop-down also contains the option “Edit Font List” which allows you to create new wish-lists of fonts and amend existing ones.

Unlike previous versions, selecting text and choosing a colour from the Properties Inspector does not simply create a CSS class style with a random name. Instead it brings up the New CSS Rule dialog box with the selector type set to “Class”. In this way, the user is aware of what Dreamweaver CS4 by Adobe is about to do and may then realise that it would be better to use an existing style. At any rate, the user is given control over the way in which the selected text will be styled. The Bold, Italic, and alignment buttons will also display the New CSS Rule dialog, in exactly the same way.

The writer works for an organisation offering Adobe Dreamweaver classes in London and the UK.