Switch between Design and Code view

Posted July 14, 2004

The more shortcuts you can learn as a designer and implement them into your work flow the more productive you can be.A shortcut I recently learned and use all the time is the ~ will switch between design and code views in Dreamweaver when editing code vs. the graphical look of a web page.

.htm is the default extension for .html files in Dreamweaver, and I want to change it

.htm is an outdated extension, from back in the days of Windows 3.1 when extensions could not be longer than three characters. To make your pages appear more professional, use a .html extension. But when you to File > New > General Basic HTML Page in Dreamweaver, and then go to save your file, you always have to manually add an â€œlâ€ at the end of .htm. Want to get around that and learn how to edit your first XML file?

In order to do so, go into the folder where you installed Dreamweaver and look for this folder and file

e.g

C:/Program Files/Macromedia/Dreamweaver MX/Configuration/Document Types/MMDocumentTypes.xml

Make sure to not open this file in dreamweaver, instead, use notepad or another rich text format program.

In the first line you should see something like this

“<documenttype id=”HTML” internaltype=”HTML” winfileextension=”htm,html,shtml,shtm,stm,lasso,xhtml” macfileextension=”html,htm,shtml,shtm,lasso,xhtml” file=”Default.html” writebyteordermark=”false”>

All you have to do, is take the htm and put in behind the html file extension. Now you may say, oh, well I’ll never use the .htm extension. But don’t delete it out of the list, Dreamweaver will not start correctly and will crash, spoken from true experience.