News Article

Our company runs training courses on Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-standard web development software. And we are increasingly finding that the profile of the person wanting to learn Dreamweaver is becoming distinctly, well, frankly, unpredictable! It seems that just about anyone nowadays can find themselves needing to build a website or to create web content in some shape or form.

Our conclusion is that the vast majority of people learning Dreamweaver nowadays are not specialists in web development or web design. They are simply people who need to develop web content in some shape or form and who have chosen or been recommended Dreamweaver as the best tool for the job. Dreamweaver is perceived as the obvious choice for both casual and professional web developers.

Dreamweaver has become the industry standard web development software, seeing off rivals like Microsoft FrontPage. And it deserves its position. It is a great software package with powerful features and an approachable interface which lets anybody who can use a computer embark on a basic software development project and, with a bit of patience and knowledge of a few fundamentals, bring it to a conclusion. Dreamweaver has attained this dominant position because its creators have always aimed to satisfy the needs of all the different types of users of their software.

In the early days of the web, all web development was done using fairly raw tools, like Windows Notepad. In the mid to late nineties, when companies started releasing WYSIWYG editors which allowed users to work in a user-friendly, visual environment, serious web developers didn’t rate these programs very highly. Even in those days, however, Dreamweaver was a cut above the rest. Macromedia wooed coders by bundling popular code editing software with Dreamweaver (HomeSite on Windows and BBEdit on Macintosh.)

About ten years ago (recognising the need to satisfy both types of user), Macromedia, the owners of Dreamweaver started making efforts to attract serious web developers to Dreamweaver. They addressed the code issue by including tools which would clean up inefficiencies in automatically-generated code and purchasing and bundling a coding utility called with Dreamweaver. They also enhanced their code environment with sophisticated features like line-numbering, colour-coding and code-hints and added other code-friendly features to supplement the visual development environment such as the tag selector which displays the HTML tags representing the objects on the page.

Another important feature that has helped to mark out Dreamweaver as a serious web development tool is its inclusion of tools for generating dynamic server side content using industry standard scripting languages such as ASP and ColdFusion and, later, ASP.Net and PHP. This functionality was originally introduced in mid 2000 in a slightly more expensive edition of Dreamweaver called Dreamweaver UltraDev. The idea back then was that heavyweight web developers would buy UltraDev and lightweights would buy the standard edition of Dreamweaver. However, in 2002, Macromedia simply stopped making UltraDev and put all of its functionality into the much cheaper standard edition of Dreamweaver, making Dreamweaver the obvious choice for web developers of all types.

Macromedia further enhanced Dreamweaver’s reputation as a tool for serious web developers by added collaborative functionality to the program; features which acknowledged the fact that a lot of web developers are part of a team. Dreamweaver’s two main collaboration features are “File check in Check out” and “Design Notes”. The former allows developer A to open a file and check it out; so that developer B knows that the file is being worked on by A and doesn’t start making conflicting changes to the file. The design notes feature allows developer A to attach a note to a particular file which can then be picked up by developer B.

The web is constantly evolving and new technologies are being developed to make web sites more appealing to visitors. The owners of Dreamweaver have always been very good at embracing these new technologies sooner rather than later. An illustration of this can be seen in the latest version of Dreamweaver which includes a series of CSS layouts which can be used by newbie web developers to create pages which separate web content from information relating to the styling of that content. Dreamweaver also has useful features for making it easy to make your content accessible to web surfers with disabilities.

The newest release of Dreamweaver, CS3, also includes support for Ajax an exciting new way of creating interactive Web applications using XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Dreamweaver’s implementation of Ajax is via Adobe’s Spry Framework for Ajax. Using the easy to use Spry interface, developers can create sophisticated Ajax interface elements, special effects and display data-driven content on their pages.

Each new release of Dreamweaver brings exciting as well as practical new features which always seem to slot nicely into the familiar easy-to-use interface. This coupled with the fact that Dreamweaver always allows experienced professionals full access and control over every aspect of the web pages and web applications they are developing should ensure that the program continues to be the automatic choice for any individual or organisation needing a decent software tool for web development of any kind.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become as pivotal a technology in the building of websites as HTML. Originally, CSS was mainly used for defining the appearance of text (font, size, colour, etc.). However, with the improvement of browser compatibility with the CSS specification, CSS is now the recommended method of controlling all aspects of the presentation of HTML documents within the browser window.

The range of computer users who have some involvement in building web pages and web sites is vast and a good many of these users choose Dreamweaver as the software tool that helps them create the web content they need without needing to become an expert on underlying technologies such as CSS. Dreamweaver CS3 includes better support for Cascading Style Sheets than previous versions. However, there is still room for improvement.

One of the most noticeable changes in this the latest version of Dreamweaver is that users are now positively encouraged to create web pages using CSS for page layout rather than tables. Each time a new web page or template is created, Dreamweaver offers you a choice of basing the page on one of about thirty preset CSS layouts with names like “3 Column Elastic” and “3 Column Fixed”.

Instead of using tables to control positioning of web page content, CSS page layout makes extensive using of the DIV element an HTML construct which can contain just about anything, including other DIVs. The preset pages created by Dreamweaver CS3 contain a series of DIV element with the CSS code that controls their positioning. The placeholder text within the DIVs includes useful tips on customising the preset pages for your own use.

The CSS code for pages created using Dreamweaver’s preset layouts is embedded in the page itself. If a user creates a series of such pages, each one will have its own CSS code making updating very time-consuming. It is far more efficient to have all of the CSS code in one external file and link each page to this one file. At present, Dreamweaver doesn’t really make this clear to new users. However, it does have an excellent feature for moving embedded CSS code into an external file. You simply select all of the CSS definitions you wish to externalise then choose Text - CSS Styles - Move CSS Rules.

This ability to move blocks of CSS is an excellent feature but one has to ask if new users will see its significance and actually use it. The fact is that, given the increasing importance of CSS and Dreamweaver’s role as the fledgling developers best friend, the program could use some improvement in the way it handles CSS.

Another area where Dreamweaver still handles CSS inefficiently is the way in which it generates CSS class styles with names like “style1″, “style2″, etc. whenever the user applies attributes like font, size or colour to highlighted text. This must be really confusing for beginners and can easily be solved by simply removing these “raw” attributes and replacing them with CSS-friendly options.