Dreamweaver (CS3) moment: text not visible in Design View

August 19, 2008

I’ve used Dreamweaver for a long time, so when I brought in a file for editing and saw that the text was not visible in Design View, I was taken by surprise. This had never happened before, and the file I was working on was fairly uncomplicated. I had a Spry collapsible panel, some JavaScript, and an iframe in the page, but I’d incorporated those elements in files before without losing text visibility.

It turns out that the problem was really quite simple. I’d used PhotoShop CS2’s Image Ready to generate an HTML page, but forgot that Image Ready had not inserted a doc type at the head of the HTML file. Once I did that, and made sure that the file was compliant (e.g. no /> end brackets in HTML, just > brackets), my text was visible in Design View.

I looked all over the Web for a solution, and there were very few, and all of those arcane and not germane to my issue. So I am publishing this here for others who encounter this simple but mystifying situation.

Posted by Lynn | Filed Under Web Tips |