Intranet Journal: Web Development

Software Review
Dreamweaver 3.0
Macromedia, Inc.

By Gordon Benett

Creating dynamic, professional-looking web pages requires knowledge, experience, planning and the right tools, not necessarily in that order. For building cross-platform, cross-browser pages that support the latest dynamic HTML features, you'll have a leg up if you start with Dreamweaver 3.0, the new release of Macromedia's state-of-the-art visual editor.

Anyone can build attractive pages with Dreamweaver, but the product's most impressive features target web professionals with a developer's bent. This is the audience that will groove on the product's Roundtrip HTML support, for instance: the ability to generate respectable HTML using drag & drop techniques while still letting you hand-edit the markup. Unlike other tools of this ilk, Dreamweaver won't overwrite your code changes when you return to visual editing.

The product's user interface, shown below, sports a full complement of floating palettes that can be configured to taste. Under the hood are many new features, some more valuable than others.

Dreamweaver workspace. Zoom to 1024x768 (64k)

On the plus side:

A handy new Quick Tag Editor, brought up by right-clicking on any page element, lets you modify, add, or remove HTML tags without leaving the Document window.

Enhancements to the HTML Source inspector include displaying line numbers and drag and drop HTML editing.

Design Notes can be attached to page elements to communicate file status and coordinate with other team members.

The ability to Import Table Data lets you populate tables with data from applications like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access.

For those who need it, the most important enhancement in Dreamweaver 3.0 may be extensibility. Macromedia has exposed some 300 new API functions that allow you to create your own JavaScript and C language extensions to the software. For example, you could add custom behavior actions to expedite the construction and maintenance of complex dynamic pages. Design Notes can be manipulated from the API as well, providing a way to automate workflow aspects such as review status and approvals.

Other enhancements are less impressive. Support for client-side image maps and special characters (such as © and ¥) should have been provided from version 1.0; they finally make it into this release. A particularly absurd addition is the ability to import and clean-up documents created with Microsoft Word's Save As HTML feature, known for its garbled output. Hopefully, no one using Dreamweaver is creating content this way. If Word documents are an important source of content for your site I strongly suggest using a dedicated tool like HTML Transit (InfoAccess, Inc.) to convert them.

Carps aside, Dreamweaver 3.0 is must-have software for web designers who prefer a visual approach to site development but don't want to relinquish control of the code.

The $299 product ($129 upgrade) runs on Windows and MacOS, and can be purchased and downloaded from Macromedia's web site or major e-tailers. A free trial version is available. In addition to the stand-alone version, Macromedia bundles Dreamweaver at a discount with Fireworks 3.0, the company's powerful graphics design tool. I'll review Fireworks in an upcoming issue.

Macromedia, Inc. 600 Townsend Street San Francisco, California 94103 Tel (415) 252-2000 Fax (415) 626-0554

The Author

Gordon Benett is an IT strategist with 15 years experience architecting and analyzing information systems. His current interests include object modeling for e-business and writing fiction, which have much in common. Reach Gordon at gbenett@mediaone.net.