Product Reviews

It's close to two years since Studio MX 2004 debuted - illogically in 2003 - and in that time we've seen little beyond a few service updates. That's perhaps indicative of the way in which the world's most-used web development suite has matured. Flash dominates interactive content design, and since the last set of updates saw it morph from animation plaything into a hardcore application coding environment, it seems there's little left to add. Fireworks, while no threat to Photoshop, retains better hooks into Dreamweaver than its rival, and Contribute, here reaching version 3, remains the only viable word processor equivalent in the world of web design.

So, beyond the looming threat of an Adobe acquisition (or merger, as Macromedia optimistically calls it), all seems to be plain sailing for the world's best-selling web development suite. Could this be why the series of impressive updates it contains have been so downplayed in this release? Let's see.

Visually, little has changed here. Dreamweaver 8 looks identical to the application that shipped as MX 2004, and the same range of template and pre-defined style sheets as shipped before. Most professional designers will shun them, but they are a valuable tool that help when it comes to learning how to use the suite. The style sheets in particular can be a real time saver, and help with accessibility compliance.

There are now, by default, rulers above and to the left of the page, and these can be dragged to reposition the zero points - much like on a DTP application. There's also an expanded set of layout modes, which make short work of forming and resizing tables, enabling you to drag borders and margins with clear visual cues as to the results, and what knock-on effect you'll have on neighbouring cells. The grid has also been brought to the fore, with all layout helpers clustered on a single drop-down menu on the tool panel. There's also a new bar on this Inspector, on which you can store your most-used buttons. Logically, it's called 'favourites'.

The code view has been enhanced, too, with the most useful addition also the simplest: highlighting a section of text puts expansion controls in the left margin beside the selection. Clicking them hides that section of code, allowing you to collapse all but the sections of the page on which you're working for a clearer view. Further options allow you to click-collapse all but the code falling inside the tag in which your cursor resides, and properly format code with indents and balanced braces. We were also pleased to see the default is no longer to close off tags as soon as you've entered the opening element, but rather to wait until you've typed the '

There are significant enhancements under the hood to the way in which Dreamweaver writes pages to interact with data sources. Using its XSLT tools, we were able to draw in data from an external RSS feed and parse our own reader by dragging and dropping feed elements into repeatable regions on our page. In all, the completed project was finished - albeit roughly - in less than two minutes.

Macromedia is trumpeting improved Word and Excel copy and paste, promising cleaner imports, and while the copy we took from Word into Dreamweaver was certainly implemented cleanly and economically, many of the features were lost. Our original style names, for instance, were carried across, but their contents were not, forcing us to redefine CSS elements such as 'Heading 3' inside Dreamweaver. Paragraph spacings were also lost. When we switched to a large Excel document, Dreamweaver refused to import our data, claiming it would take 'too long'. Switching to something smaller was more successful, and we were pleased to see it was smart enough to copy across the value results of our equations rather than the raw sums themselves.

The Styles engine itself finally works in an entirely logical and efficient manner, creating a clear distinction between temporary and permanent CSS elements. Making any on-page change to a defined style - for example, applying bold to a CSS tag that renders your text in 12pt red Verdana - will write a new style to the sheet to incorporate this change without overwriting your existing style. Styling any other text with the same click of the bold button will then apply the new style once more, while removing any text that uses these dynamically generated styles will erase them from the style sheet. Anything you defined manually will remain on the sheet, even if all of the elements making use of it are deleted.

There are still some rough edges, such as the way it handles PHP includes: picking this include option from the tool panel still dumps you into the split-code view and expects you to type the path to the included file; there's no option to choose it with the pick whip.

The real test of any new application, though, is whether there are enough improvements to warrant an upgrade. In this case, we would say yes. The new CSS tools are Dreamweaver 8's ace card, keeping your styling accurate and consistent across the whole of your site in a more passive manner than those in any previous release. The improved XSLT tools gear it up for use in an increasingly dynamic online environment, and small touches such as the enhanced coding environment, which has improved with every release, are the icing on the cake. In all, a big thumbs-up, and a definite upgrade opportunity for anyone using the original Dreamweaver MX or earlier - just as long as you have a couple of nice deep pockets.