The objects, properties, and especially the methods described in Chapter 2, "The Document Object Model," were a good foundation on which to build extensibility into Dreamweaver. Several tasks unique to authoring environments cannot be accomplished with the methods available in the Netscape, Microsoft, or W3C DOMs, however. The most obvious example of this is selection, which is integral to the user experience in an authoring environment: DOM Level 1 and the proprietary browser DOMs do not address selection because users cannot select and modify content (except in form fields) in a browser window.
To make creating useful Dreamweaver extensions and customizing Dreamweaver menus possible, Dreamweaver exposes more than 400 JavaScript functions to developers beyond the standards-based DOM methods. This represents a huge expansion over what was available in Dreamweaver 2. Almost any task that the user can accomplish in Dreamweaver with the menus, floating palettes, inspectors, Site window, or Document window can now be done with JavaScript.