Showing and hiding invisible elements

Some HTML code doesn’t have a visible representation in a browser. For example, comment tags don’t appear in browsers. However, it can be useful while you’re creating a page to be able to select such invisible elements, edit them, move them, and delete them.

Dreamweaver enables you to specify whether it shows icons marking the location of invisible elements in the Design view of the Document window. To indicate which element markers appear when you select View > Visual Aids > Invisible Elements, you can set options in Invisible Elements preferences. For example, you can specify that named anchors be visible, but not line breaks.

You can create certain invisible elements (such as comments and named anchors) using buttons in the Common category of the Insert bar (see Using the Insert bar). You can then modify these elements using the Property inspector.

To show or hide marker icons for invisible elements:

• Select View > Visual Aids > Invisible Elements.

  NOTE

  Showing invisible elements may slightly change the layout of a page, moving other elements by a few pixels, so for precision layout, hide the invisible elements.

To change Invisible Elements preferences:

1. Select Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Dreamweaver > Preferences (Macintosh), then click Invisible Elements.
2. Select which elements should be made visible.

   A check mark next to the name of the element in the dialog box means the element is visible when View > Visual Aids > Invisible Elements is selected.

   For more information see Setting Invisible Elements preferences.

3. Click OK.