Real World Computing

Fortunately, Microsoft and Adobe weren't the only developers of web authoring applications. In the mid-1990s, Macromedia was a small company best known for its CD-ROM authoring application Director and, like Microsoft and Adobe, it saw the web through its own Director-tinted goggles. The difference was that Macromedia was right - the web was indeed more suitable for delivering screen-based multimedia and hypertext rather than page-orientated DOC and PDF documents. What was needed was a web-based universal delivery mechanism, which Macromedia provided in its cross-platform, cross-browser Shockwave plug-in.

Flash of inspiration

However, the web wasn't yet ready for bitmap-based Director extravaganzas, so in 1996 Macromedia purchased the vector-based FutureSplash Animator, renamed it Flash and released a similar universal plug-in player for delivering its Shockwave Flash (SWF) movies. By providing support through a browser add-on, Macromedia ensured that Flash wasn't perceived as an alternative or proprietary extension to HTML, but as a natural cross-platform enhancement. This meant Macromedia needed a dedicated HTML authoring package, so in 1997 it launched Dreamweaver.

Crucially, unlike Adobe and Microsoft's apps, Dreamweaver works with the HTML format rather than against it. Alongside its visual design view, Dreamweaver has always offered dedicated features for working with HTML tags, such as a split view, code highlighting and auto-complete. And while Dreamweaver's core code is streamlined and compliant, whenever you need to go beyond the inherent limitations of HTML the obvious solution is to add a dusting of Flash.

However, it's Dreamweaver's focus on direct code markup that proved its greatest strength in moving beyond HTML: 2002's Dreamweaver MX was perfectly placed to take advantage of new, tag-based web scripting languages such as PHP, ASP and ColdFusion that drove the database-driven expansion of the web. More significantly from a design perspective, Dreamweaver was ready to embrace the next generation of web pages built on the XHTML and CSS markup languages.

XHTML (eXtensible HTML) is a more rigorous implementation of HTML that cuts out all unwanted proprietary browser extensions and demands full standards compliance, while CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a dedicated presentational language designed to work alongside XHTML and provide serious typographical and layout control. Together with Dreamweaver 8's Ajax support - which adds live interaction with the server controlled through JavaScript and XML - XHTML and CSS offer designers a comparatively reliable and design-rich development platform (and Dreamweaver helps users get around IE 6's typically idiosyncratic implementation of CSS standards compliance). FrontPage and GoLive's attempts to graft design power on to HTML were exposed as feeble and misguided workarounds, to the extent that the use of and tags is now actively deprecated. Macromedia had outmanoeuvred Microsoft and Adobe, and Dreamweaver plus Flash Professional now dominate professional web development.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft wasn't happy and there was much talk that it would acquire Macromedia. The big shock came in 2005, when it was Adobe that announced Macromedia had agreed to a buyout. From virtually nowhere, Adobe now owned the professional web design space as totally as it did print-orientated design. Moreover, with its recent CS3 bundles, which dumped GoLive in favour of Dreamweaver, Adobe was positioned to exert dominance across the entire design arena.

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