we move into Cascading Style Sheets. For now, let's modify our example by highlighting the paragraphs of text (not the headings) and choosing an absolute value of 2. As you can see from Figure 3.19, the text changes size. Figure 3.19. Change the size of text within our fictitious company's web page to an absolute value of 2. [View full size image]   Text Colors Yet another frustrating topic in web development is that of choosing the right colors for your website. Unlike print publishing programs or word processing programs where you open a color palette containing millions of colors, browsers choose from a web-safe color palette of 216 colors that are familiar to all computers. Doing this guarantees that the colors we choose are viewed accurately on browsers independent of platform or operating system. Dreamweaver organizes web-safe colors in the Text Color chip available just to the right of the Size menu in the Properties Inspector. Selecting this chip opens the Color palette, shown in Figure 3.20, and turns the pointer into an eyedropper allowing you to sample colors from Dreamweaver's interface. Figure 3.20. The Color palette opens allowing you to sample from a list of web-safe colors or directly from Dreamweaver's interface. [View full size image]   A complete list of features supported by Dreamweaver's Color palette are outlined here: Color Cubes: Displays a list of web-safe colors organized within cubes starting with Black cubes on the left, followed by grayscale cubes, RGB cubes, CMYK cubes, and so on. Color Preview: Displays a larger preview of the color when your mouse rolls over a color cube. Hexadecimal Value: Displays the hexidecimal value of the color when your mouse rolls over the color cube. Explaining the concept of hexidecimal values can be a lengthy topic. For this reason, additional resources are provided in Appendix C, "General Resources." Default Color: Selecting this option returns the selection back to its default color. Because this option can also useful for cancelling out of the Color palette, pressing the Esc key on your keyboard is a much better option. System Color Palette: If you're working in an intranet environment where you know everyone in your orgranization uses the same computer configuration along with the same monitor, you can think about using a wider range of colors for your site. If this is the case, you may want to choose this option to select from the system color palette. The system color palette is a predefined color palette based on the operating system you target. Options Menu: Click this arrow icon for additonal options including displaying Color Cubes (default), Continuous Tone, Windows OS, MAC OS, and Grayscale. Selecting the last option within this list, Snap to Web Safe, gaurantees that a web-safe color is always selected even if you sample a non web-safe color from the development environment. To demonstrate the use of color, let's highlight the text on the page and modify the color so that it shows as a dark blue. To do this, highlight the text and click the color chip; when the pointer turns into an eyedropper, sample the dark blue color in the header image. The Color palette closes, and your text turns dark blue. Furthermore, once you've selected the color, the hexadecimal value appears in the text box just to the right of the color chip in the Properties Inspector.