Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Training from the Source

2017-07-07 02:10:07

There are two options in the Property inspectorcalled Text Outdent and Text Indentwhose names might be misleading at first glance. They should not be used as a method of indenting text but rather to signify a quoted passage of text. They function by enclosing a block of text in what is called a blockquote. A blockquote is a block-level element that indicates the text it contains is a quotethe default appearance of which is indenting the text on both sides, hence the name Text Indent. It is usually reserved for long passages of text that have been quoted. The blockquote does not place opening and closing quotation marks around the quoteyou'll need to add these in the text itself.

Place the cursor inside the quote that appears above the Announcements header and then click Text Indent in the Property inspector.

Tip

You can also choose Text > Indent to apply a blockquote and therefore indent the selected text.

The paragraph now appears indented on both the left and right margins. Blockquotes are applied to entire paragraphs. The only way to control the amount of this indentation is by creating a CSS style for the blockquote elementapplying the blockquote without CSS will use the default spacing that is determined by the browser and that can differ from browser to browser.

Tip

If nearby paragraphs become indented as well, check to see whether you are using paragraphs or two line breaks. To be certain you are using a paragraph return, place the pointer at the beginning of the paragraph you want to indent. Press Delete (Macintosh) or Backspace (Windows) until you reach the end of the preceding paragraph, and press Return (Macintosh) or Enter (Windows) to create a new paragraph.

If you want to indent text that isn't a quote to set it apart from standard body text on the page or if you want to indent only the first line of a paragraph, you should use CSS (covered in Lesson 4).

Click the Text Outdent button in the Property inspector or choose Text > Outdent to remove a blockquote.

Note

In XHTML, blockquotes must contain block-level elements such as paragraphsnot just text. To meet this requirement, Dreamweaver will automatically maintain the paragraph formatting around the original element in XHTML documents.

There are a number of additional attributes that can be applied to blockquotes, including cite, which is used to specify the URL source of the quote, lang, which indicates what language the quote is in, and title, which is used to display a tooltipa short message that will give the user additional information by displaying the message when the mouse rolls over the blockquote. These attributes can also be applied to a number of other tags. You can add such attributes using Dreamweaver's coding tools that are covered in Lesson 16.

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