Product Review: Dreamweaver 3
January 26, 2000
The Best
A brief history of visual HTML editors: they used to stink.
Badly. A glut of editors washed up onto the marketplace like
an oil slick once software makers got wind of the HTML
revolution several years ago, and the gummy taste was left
in many a developer's mouth for a long time hence. One of the
most irritating problems flagrantly exhibited by many visual
HTML editors was the way in which they altered, and often
damaged, original source HTML to force it to conform
to their own, often limited, view of valid hypertext markup.
Dreamweaver, when it first arrived on the scene, promised a
"developer's perspective" on web design, and
offered an olive branch to authors otherwise afraid of visual
editors and their code mangling ways.
Dreamweaver 3 extends on this manner of code-friendliness in
two significant ways. Developers who embed pseudo-HTML into
their web pages, such as ASP or PHP, can instruct Dreamweaver
3 to ignore these sets of tags, leaving them untouched
from the original source. Whereas many visual editors now
offer a parallel "source code" view, where you can
make direct manual code edits, Dreamweaver 3 offers a new
pop-up window that they call a "Quick Tag Editor",
basically allowing you to select a visual element of the page
and manually edit its underlying HTML without switching over
to the entire source code view. In combination with
enhanced synchronization between the source code view and the
visual editor, Dreamweaver 3 goes a long way to make the
manual coder feel at ease in the visual environment, without
worrying that the underlying HTML is forever hidden.
Despite its tolerant approach to hardcore coders, the
Dreamweaver series has also been significant in providing
complex HTML and
Dynamic HTML
tricks to non-coders.
Known in Macromedia lingo as "behaviors", these are
essentially pre-coded chunks which developers can attach to
pages and elements such as pop-up messages,
navigation menus, and even sliding layers. There is,
admittedly, a certain gimmicky feel to behaviors, and these
coarse sets of prefab modules can often lead devlopers into
designing sites which share common looks and feel -- somewhat
like comparing an architect-designed home to a modular house.
To their credit, though, Macromedia has put a lot of effort
into cross-browser coding, and this is where behaviors can
really save a lot of time and headache, even for the manual
coder.
Whether you like Macromedia's prefab behaviors or not, sometimes the
convenience of simply selecting browser compatibility
from a drop down menu
beats the hell out of manually coding version detection
using a text editor.
Dreamweaver's history palette is another wonderful addition,
a running account of each change you have made to a page,
akin to the same in popular graphics applications such as
Photoshop. Finally, the old "undo" method of
revisionism has matured into a fully modifiable timeline of
events. And, speaking as one who hates typing data into large
tables, Macromedia was on the ball in adding an Import Table
Data feature, wherein you can slurp data from a delimited
text file right into an HTML table ... a convenience to be
sure, not unlike automobile cup holders, but great when you
need it.
The Dubious
Macromedia has always included a number of convenience
features, however, of a more arguable nature. Dreamweaver's
"libraries" and "templates",
for instance, are mechanisms for using templates to generate
and edit web sites which contain a lot of common design
across pages. While this can be convenient, said technology
would require you to always use Dreamweaver to maintain the
web site, and this particular developer does not enjoy feeling
so bound. The more standard way of creating template-based
sites would be to rely, for instance, on server-side includes.
To its credit, Dreamweaver does support server-side
includes, to the extent that an editor can do so. But it would
be nicer if Dreamweaver could allow you to use its template
and library facilities in development only, yet publish the
resulting pages using server-side includes, if one wishes.
On a similar note, Dreamweaver 3 introduces a "new"
type of style sheet, which they call an
"HTML Style Sheet". The strict coder will
tell you, legitimately, that content style should be applied
to a page using
CSS,
or cascading style sheets, which both Dreamweaver 2 and 3
support. Macromedia's "HTML style sheets" are a
sort-of cheat, wherein you can construct styles (such as
"bold, red") that Dreamweaver applies using HTML
tags and attributes (such as <FONT>) rather than proper
CSS attributes. Ostensibly, this sort of cheating helps the
developer design styles that can be viewed by browsers which
do not support CSS -- namely, pre-version 4 browsers. That
said, it seems that as developers we should be moving forward
both in page design and browser support for standards such as
CSS (which exist for many good reasons), and using software
tricks to cheat into backwards-compatibility is not
necessarily the direction we should be heading.
Product Review: Dreamweaver 3
HTML Editor Reviews
Product Review: Dreamweaver 3
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