What are property inspectors?

The Property inspector is perhaps the most familiar floating palette in the Dreamweaver interface. It is indispensable for defining, reviewing, and changing the name, size, appearance, and other attributes of the selection, as well as for launching internal and external editors for the selected element.

Dreamweaver has several built-in interfaces for the Property inspector that let you set properties for many standard HTML tags. With custom property inspector files, you can override these built-in interfaces or create new ones to inspect custom tags.

Property inspector files are HTML files that reside in the Configuration/Inspectors folder inside the Dreamweaver application folder. The first line of a property inspector file (the line above the opening HTML tag) must be a comment in the following format:

<!-- tag:tagNameOrKeyword,priority:1to10,selection:exactOrWithin,hline,vline -->

where:

	tagNameOrKeyword is the tag to be inspected or one of the following keywords: *COMMENT* (for comments), *LOCKED* (for locked regions), or *ASP* (for ASP tags).
	1to10 is the priority of the inspector file: 1 indicates that this inspector should be used only when no others can inspect the selection; 10 indicates that this inspector takes precedence over all others that can inspect the selection.
	exactOrWithin indicates whether the selection can be within the tag (within) or must exactly contain the tag (exact).
	hline (optional) indicates that a horizontal gray line should appear between the upper and lower halves of the inspector in expanded mode.
	vline (optional) indicates that a vertical gray line should appear between the tag name field and the rest of the properties in the inspector (see the image property inspector for an example).

The following comment would be appropriate for an inspector that is designed to inspect the HAPPY tag:

<!-- tag:HAPPY,priority:8,selection:exact,hline,vline -->

The BODY of a property inspector file contains an HTML form. Instead of displaying the form contents in a dialog box, however, Dreamweaver uses the form to define the input areas and layout of the inspector.