Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

The implementation is simple, but it remains powerful. There are options for validating form elements such as option boxes and text areas, so you can check that end user data input meets certain criteria as it's entered - no more blanket form rejections because it wasn't filled in correctly. There are also five options for live data handling via XML so you can, for example, add an interactive product listing table that can be sorted without the need for a page refresh. When used in conjunction with a Spry "detail region", you can also set product details and an image to appear elsewhere on the page when a product is selected.

Perhaps the most useful Ajax-based options will be the new user interface components. With the Menu Bar widget, you can add navigational menu buttons that display submenus when hovered over. With the Collapsible Panel, you can hide and reveal content by clicking on the panel's title. With the Tabbed Panel, you can display multiple panels one at a time, which is just what the Accordion widget does too. In all cases, the Ajax works to make a large amount of information more accessible and manageable.

Adobe also throws in a range of Spry-based effects. These are accessed from the Behaviours panel rather than the Insert menu and are designed to let you add visual transitions to elements, making them grow, shrink, fade, highlight, squish and so on. This might smack of the bad old days of gratuitous DHTML but, used sensibly, they can give a page a lift, draw the end user's attention and simply make the page more involving - in short, better designed. This is true of the Spry framework in general, and there are few sites that couldn't benefit from some Ajax-based dynamic design.

Conclusion

That's about it for new internal power, but, as always, Dreamweaver benefits greatly from its supporting applications, particularly if you're buying it as part of one of the CS3 Web suites that includes the tight integration with the latest Contribute and Fireworks. Integration with the latter has been greatly improved, with the ability to paste copied objects directly into Dreamweaver, while maintaining the link to the original, so you can quickly edit and then paste back the new version with all optimisation settings intact. If you buy either of the Premium editions of the suites, the same capability is offered with the bundled version of Photoshop CS3 Extended. And as a standalone app, Dreamweaver includes Bridge CS3 for media management, while Device Central CS3 lets you see what content will look like on a range of mobile devices.

Over recent years, Dreamweaver has idled as Macromedia concentrated on Flash as the best way to enhance the end user's web experience. With Dreamweaver CS3, Adobe has rightly put page-based authoring back centre-stage.

Author: Tom Arah