Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

The AP Elements Panel

The AP Elements panel (Figure 9-24) helps you manage absolutely positioned elements. To open it, choose Window→AP Elements, or press F2. It’s called the AP Elements panel instead of the AP Divs panel because any tag that has an ID style and has its position property set to absolute (see Absolute Positioning) appears here. So if you absolutely position a single paragraph, its ID appears in this panel. The panel’s three columns provide information on each element:

Figure 9-24. The AP Elements panel lets you name, reorder, and change the visibility of AP elements. Turning on the “Prevent overlaps” checkbox ensures you can’t position or drag one AP div on top of another. This feature is intended to make it easy to convert an AP div layout to a table-based layout using the Modify→Convert→“AP divs to Table”. Don’t do it! This creates horribly bloated HTML that easily falls apart as you add, edit, and adjust content on the page.

• Visibility. To change an absolutely positioned element’s visibility property (Visibility), click in the column with the eye icon next to the element’s name. An open eye indicates that the property is set to visible; a closed eye, means it’s hidden. No eye icon at all represents the factory setting: The element is visible on the page, but you haven’t set its visibility property.

• AP element ID. If you use Dreamweaver’s Draw AP div tool, Dreamweaver ...