One of the truisms of Web page development
is that if you repeat an element across your site, you??™re sure to have to change it??”on every page.
Dreamweaver libraries eliminate that drudgery. You can define almost anything as a Library element: a paragraph
of text, an image, a link, a table, a form, a Java applet, an ActiveX control, and so on. Just choose the
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Introducing Dreamweaver CS3 2
item and open the Library category of the Assets panel (see Figure 2-20). After you??™ve created the Library
entry, you can reuse it throughout your Web site. Each Web site can have its own library, and you can copy
entries from one library to another.
FIGURE 2-20
Use Dreamweaver??™s Library feature to simplify the task of updating elements repeated across many Web pages.
Being able to include boilerplate Web elements is one issue; being able to update them across the site simultaneously
is quite another! You can easily change a library entry through the Library category of the Assets
panel. After the change is complete, Dreamweaver detects the modification and asks if you want to update
your site. Imagine updating copyright information across a 400+ page Web site in the wink of an eye, and
you start to understand the power of Dreamweaver libraries.
To find out more about making sitewide changes with library items, see Chapter 29.
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