Why have pro Web designers avoided WYSIWYG HTML editors like yesterday's spam? Because every visual Web-authoring tool to date has insisted on stylizing all the code it reads - adding meta creation tags, uppercasing attributes, and obliterating nested statements - in the name of clarification. It was faster for webmasters to code their pages by hand using basic text editors than try to wrestle their mangled code back into shape. It was faster, that is, until now.
Dreamweaver, by Macromedia, is a fourth-generation Web-development tool created by and for professional Web designers - and it doesn't muck up your code. Through a deceptively simple process called Roundtrip HTML, Dreamweaver treats your programming with a "look, don't touch" attitude - the Number One request of the webmasters Macromedia consulted while developing the program.
What other dreams does Dreamweaver fulfill? Start with a full implementation of the latest HTML specs: Dynamic HTML, for adding the third dimension of layers to otherwise flat Web pages; absolute and relative positioning through cross-browser-compatible cascading style sheets; support for both Shockwave Director and Shockwave Flash movies; and a Director-like timeline for controlling interactive animation without plug-ins. Dreamweaver creates clean, optimized code that works with both Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.0 - and it's backward compatible.
Dreamweaver's weaknesses lie in its lack of extensive database and site-management tools. Macromedia has evidently stopped development on its data-savvy Backstage Designer, and you can probably expect to eventually find some of those features in Dreamweaver. While the program can keep track of checked-out files, you have to rely on the brute power of text editors HomeSite or BBEdit for link verification and global search-and-replace functions.
Dreamweaver is among the priciest of the current Web-creation tool crop. Nonetheless, the time you'll save using its Library feature - which allows you to update recurring elements across all your pages by editing just one item - is by itself almost worth the cost of admission. Toss in a prebuilt JavaScript Behaviors Library for hard-to-program effects like rollovers and slide shows, and HTML validation targetable to specific browsers and Dreamweaver is everything you could ask for. You, and a gaggle of pro webmasters.
STREET CRED
Smooth in the Crud Speedpass Gas
Web Dreams
