Adobe Creative Suite 2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques

#57. Working with the Outline Editor

Unique to GoLive, the Outline Editor serves as a powerful yet easy-to-understand view into your Web page designs. The Outline Editor tab is situated between the Source Code Editor tab and the Preview tab. Within the Outline Editor you can see the HTML elements that make up your page in a hierarchical, structured view. Easily navigate through this structure by expanding and collapsing tags (Figure 57a).

Figure 57a. The Outline Editor provides a nicely structured view into your Web pages that can be less daunting than peering into the source code.

Keys for Using the Outline Editor

When using the Outline Editor, a couple of keyboard combinations are worth knowing. You can naturally traverse the hierarchy using your keyboard's arrow keys. Use the up and down arrow keys to select the tags above and below in the structured list. You can use the right arrow key to expand a selected tag and the left arrow key to collapse it. The Return key (Mac) or the numerical keypad Enter key (Windows) toggles the expansion of a selected tag. To recursively expand or collapse a selected tag, press Option+Return (Mac) or Shift+Enter (Windows).

Attributes assigned to an element are displayed on their own level within the structure, making it easy to distinguish an attribute from an element. Finding available attributes and adding them to an element is just as easy. Simply expand a tag and select an attribute from the attribute menu by clicking the smallest down arrow directly to the right of the tag name (Figure 57b). This is useful when you don't exactly know which attributes are available for a particular tag or what they're referred to as.

Figure 57b. The attributes menu displays all the available attributes for a given tag, taking the guesswork out of which attributes you can choose.

You add elements to the Outline Editor just as you would in the Layout Editor. Drag elements from the Tools/Objects palette into a position in the structure to add them within the Outline Editor. Drag the gripper handle of a tag to move it to another location in the outline.

The Outline Editor is also effective at weeding out bugs in your pages since any broken links or syntax errors are highlighted in red, making them easy to notice and fix within one cohesive view (see #60). Be sure to click the Show Link Warnings button in the Main toolbar to have broken links highlighted.

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