Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Unleashed- P5: The good news is Dreamweaver provides numerous windows, panels, inspectors, and toolbars for streamlining the way you build websites. The bad news, unfortunately, is that Dreamweaver provides numerous windows, panels, inspectors, and toolbars for streamlining the way you build websites. Why so many windows, panels, and so on, Dreamweaver is unprecedented in the feature set it provides, allowing developers complete control when building websites and applications | Broken Links Broken links are hyperlinks that are not referenced properly. They generally will be linked to a file that does not exist in a particular directory or that in most cases is misreferenced. External Links This report is a list of external path references within your site. Because Dreamweaver has no way of checking for external links it will at the very least list them out so you can check them manually in one short concise list. Orphaned Files Orphaned files are files that exist within folders in your site but that are not directly referenced by your web pages. Assets for instance will always appear within this list even when cloaked. Dreamweaver is providing a list so that later you can go into your site and perform a manual clean up of unused files. Before we demonstrate the process of checking links let s actually create a broken link within our new page. You can do this by opening placing your cursor on the page and choosing Insert Hyperlink. When the Hyperlink dialog appears enter the value Fake Link within the Text text box and then enter a broken path in the Link field perhaps . Remember doesn t actually exist. We re purposely creating a broken reference here to test the functionality. Click OK and save the page. Now we re ready to check for bad links. Checking links within your site can be accomplished using one of two methods. First you can check the links for an individual file and second you can check links for an entire defined site. Because the process for both is similar I ll demonstrate the Check Links Sitewide feature for an entire site here. You can do this by following these steps 1. Within the Files panel select the defined site right-click Control click to access the context menu and choose Check Links Entire Local Site. The Results panel will appear with the Link Checker tab highlighted similar to Figure . Figure . Open the Link Checker by choosing Check Links Entire Local .
