Selecting elements in the Document window

To select an element in the Design view of the Document window, you generally click the element. If an element is invisible, you must make it visible before you can select it. For more information about invisible elements, see Showing and hiding invisible elements.

To select elements, use these techniques:

• To select a visible element in the Document window, click the element or drag across the element.
• To select an invisible element, select View > Visual Aids > Invisible Elements (if that menu item isn’t already selected) and then click the element’s marker in the Document window.

  Some objects appear on the page in a place other than where their code is inserted. For example, a layer can be anywhere on the page, but the code defining the layer is in a fixed location. When invisible elements are showing, Dreamweaver displays markers in the Document window to show the location of the code for such elements. Selecting a marker selects the entire element; for example, selecting the marker for a layer selects the entire layer. (See Showing and hiding invisible elements.)

• To select a complete tag (including its contents, if any), click a tag in the tag selector at the lower left of the Document window. (The tag selector appears in both Design view and Code view.) The tag selector always shows the tags that contain the current selection or insertion point. The leftmost tag is the outermost tag containing the current selection or insertion point. The next tag is contained in that outermost tag, and so on; the rightmost tag is the innermost one that contains the current selection or insertion point.

  In the following example, the insertion point is in a paragraph tag, <p>. To select the table containing the paragraph you want to select, select the <table> tag to the left of the <p> tag.

  

To see the HTML code associated with the selected text or object, do one of the following:

• In the Document toolbar, click the Show Code View button.
• Select View > Code.
• In the Document toolbar, click the Show Code and Design Views button.
• Select View > Code and Design.
• Select Window > Code Inspector.

For more information about Code view, see Viewing your code.

When you select something in either code editor (Code view or the Code inspector), it’s generally also selected in the Document window. You may need to synchronize the two views before the selection appears; see Viewing your code.