Behaviors

Behaviors Overview

In the Document Object Model (DOM), everything in a page is an object. Tables, images, paragraphs, etc., are all objects and can have actions applied to them. In Dreamweaver, Behaviors can be associated with most objects in the document.

A Behavior is some Action that is associated with some Event.

Since different objects have different behaviors that can be associated with them, the list of actions varies depending on what object tag is currently selected.

In the example above, two layers were created, both hidden by default. The link for the word Action has two behaviors associated with it. One Shows the hidden layer when the event onMouseOver occurs. The other Hides the same layer when onMouseOut occurs.

More Examples

Popup Message
Click on this link to make a popup window appear.

Play a Timeline

Timelines are a quick way to add simple animation to your page. Timelines can start automatically when a page is loaded, or be associated with a behavior as in this example. The three images above rewind, play and stop the timeline animation, respectively.

Rollovers
Dreamweaver 2.0 comes with a Rollover Object with which you simply point to the original image and the rollover image and it inserts the JavaScript for you. You may still use the Behaviors Swap Image and Swap Image Restore to create your own (often more interesting) rollovers. For example, your rollover could be somewhere other than the mouse location.

Check Browser
This is a very useful behavior if you have spend a great deal of time developing a page that works only for 4.0 browsers but you would like to send any of your audience using older browsers to another page. You can control where your audience goes depending on what browser type they have using the Check Browser Behavior. Try the following link.
Click here to be directed according to the type of your browser.