Editor X Essentials

Element hierarchy and parenting.

Hierarchy in web design refers to the structure of elements—like pages, sections and images—and the parenting model determines how the elements interact with each other. At the top of the hierarchy is the page and within that you have sections. Containers are added to sections along with elements like images and text.

Parenting and children.

Elements with other elements inside them are referred to as parents. The elements inside the parent are referred to as children. An element can be a child of one element but a parent to another.

The Layers panel and a layer is chosen to open the floating action bar. Text is highlighted from the breadcrumbs.

Attaching & detaching.

You can attach any element to a parent container. An attached element becomes the child of that container. You can detach it anytime by dragging it outside. This reparents the element. For example, if you drag an element outside of a container, it could attach to the section itself and become the child of the section.

Note: You can’t change the hierarchy of elements per breakpoint. If you change the hierarchy at one breakpoint, it changes the hierarchy for all breakpoints.

Several elements are highlighted together and the attach option is shown.

Resizing.

You can set how a parent container and its children resize across all breakpoints. The size of a parent element can affect its child elements. If, for example, you size a parent to %, the elements inside will resize relative to it.

The Inspector Panel is open. The VideoBox is selected. Under the Layers section, the Sizing options are set to Fluid and the width percentage is highlighted.

Arranging elements.

Right click an element and select Arrange to bring it forward or backward in relation to other elements in the same parent container. You can also rearrange the order of elements within their parent container from the Layers panel.

The element has been right clicked and Arrange is selected to show more arrangement options.

Breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs let you climb up in the hierarchy to navigate between, and select different elements on the canvas. For example, if you select a button, you can use breadcrumbs to grab the container it’s placed in. When an element is stretched, it can be tricky to grab the parent beneath it, so the breadcrumbs come in handy here.

Note: Elements on the same level of the hierarchy—like a button and paragraph text within the same container—will not appear in the same breadcrumbs thread.

The element is selected to show the floating action bar and the breadcrumbs menu below.

Layers panel.

You can view the hierarchy of each section in the Layers panel. Each parent container appears like a folder and the children appear as subitems underneath. Here, you can rearrange elements within their parent container using drag and drop. Click the 3 dots beside an element to hide it at a certain breakpoint.