Product Reviews

With more than 3.5 million users, Dreamweaver dominates the world of professional web authoring in much the same way that Photoshop dominates photo editing. It's achieved this commanding position by combining a wysiwyg design environment with unbeatable hands-on coding power, and by focusing throughout on workflow-based efficiency. It's these same three core areas - visual design, coding and productivity - that are targeted in this latest release.

In terms of design power, Dreamweaver 8 now falls into line with GoLive by offering a comprehensive zoom capability - ranging from 6 to 3,600 per cent - and Fit All, Fit Width and Fit Selection commands. While all this is potentially helpful for those working on high-resolution screens or when aligning objects, its importance shouldn't be overplayed - web design is nearly always viewed at 100 per cent. Of much more practical use is the new support for rulers and draggable guides, complete with tooltips for providing feedback on position and distances. You can control the display, locking and snap setting of guides, and Dreamweaver 8 includes a limited selection of preset guides representing the safe visible area of browsers at various screen sizes.

Focus on CSS

Other improvements to Dreamweaver's wysiwyg concentrate on enhanced support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the layout and formatting mark-up language designed to work alongside HTML. In particular, the core Design view has been updated to fully support advanced CSS techniques, such as overflow handling, form elements and pseudo-elements. And to make life a little easier when working with CSS-positioned layouts, new visual aids are available to highlight CSS outlines, boxes and backgrounds, while tooltips provide greater feedback. Most impressive is version 8's support for CSS media types. Using the new Rendering Toolbar, you can now swap between seeing how a page will look onscreen, on a handheld or in print. Most useful of all, you can see how the page will render if the display device doesn't support CSS.

The ever-increasing importance of CSS is also made clear in changes to the working environment. In particular, the former Design panel group has been renamed CSS and the previously separate Relevant CSS/Rules panel has been consolidated into a single CSS Styles panel. This now offers two tabs, All and Current, for handling all stylesheets associated with the page as a whole and those feeding into the current selection's formatting. It's an efficient system, providing feedback and powerful editing capability, showing Dreamweaver at its streamlined best. These are all welcome tweaks, but apart from the ability to limit the display to properties that have already been set, most of this power was already there in MX 2004 - it's just been rationalised.

HANDS-ON CODING

The CSS panel is a great way to directly access the power of code without getting your hands dirty, but for maximum control there's no escape - you have to edit your code directly. Whether you're working with static HTML/CSS or the dynamic markup

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languages, JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, PHP or ColdFusion, Dreamweaver has always made this as simple and efficient as possible. Particularly important here are Code view features such as built-in references, code hinting and syntax completion, and these have been updated to take into account the latest versions of PHP 5 and ColdFusion MX7.

Whichever language you're using, you'll also benefit from the new Coding toolbar running down the left-hand side of the Code view, which provides quick access to snippets and source formatting, invalid code highlighting, commenting and so on. It also provides the ability to collapse and expand tags or selections; the idea is to let you focus in on sections of code, but we found it complicated and a possible source of confusion when working with HTML/CSS.

Code collapse makes much more sense when working with more structured languages, most obviously XML, and this is a major focus in Dreamweaver 8. New reference content has been added for XML/XSLT, and code hinting has been improved. Dreamweaver 8 also comprehensively tackles the formerly dark art of XML-to-HTML conversion via server-side and client-side XSL transformations. Most impressively, users with server-side support can now simply point to an XML file or live data feed, such as RSS, and Dreamweaver will introspect it, enabling fields to be dragged and dropped onto the page ready for formatting.

But while Dreamweaver 8's XML/XSLT support sets a new standard, it's still a minority interest and most sites will be built on static HTML/CSS for a good while to come. So what does Dreamweaver 8 offer these mainstream users? Again, the focus is on workflow and productivity. Virtually all users will be reusing content written in Word, for example, and Dreamweaver 8 now offers a Paste Special command that lets you control how copied text should be handled. Options include pasting just the text, text with structure, text with structure and basic formatting, or text with full structure and all formatting, including styles. We had high hopes for this, but the command needs to offer more control to be truly useful - for example, paragraph breaks are still interpreted as line breaks.

As well as text import, Dreamweaver 8 revamps its Flash support with Import FlashPaper and Import Flash Video commands. The latter is particularly useful, as a single dialog lets you set up your FLV file for streaming or progressive download and choose from nine playback skins - it's as simple as that. Or rather it is if you have your FLV files ready to go. That's not a problem if you're a Studio 8 user, as Flash Professional 8 comes with FLV export plug-ins and a standalone video converter. However, these aren't bundled with the standalone version of Dreamweaver, so you'll need to buy in a dedicated FLV authoring package.

When it comes to publishing though, the productivity benefits of Dreamweaver 8 aren't in doubt. Compatibility with a wider array of servers is now offered, including digest authentication and SSL secure transfer for WebDAV. Check-in, check-out has also been improved and you can now compare files both locally and remotely. Most usefully, the Synchronise command has been reworked to allow files to be removed from the transfer list or deleted entirely, and files are now transferred in the background. This last capability in particular could potentially save many users hours of lost work.

But it's one of the very few new stand-out features in this release. Thanks to its existing strengths, Dreamweaver remains the best web-authoring package available. However, for most, there's disappointingly little to be gained from upgrading.