Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 in Software

Another important change in current web design practice has been the move to dynamic content handling. The secret behind this is Ajax, which combines JavaScript, CSS and XML to update page content live within the browser without requiring a new page request.

Dreamweaver CS3 introduced such handling with its support for the Spry Ajax framework; CS4 greatly extends its scope, starting with a major reworking of the core Spry Dataset component. Previously this was limited to working with advanced XML data such as RSS feeds, but it can now accept data, including images, from simple HTML tables or lists, and provides a wizard to set up such simple data sets.

It's not just input handling that's been enhanced, you can now output the data as stacked containers, a sortable table or a master/detail relationship - all excellent ways of dealing with large amounts of repetitive data onscreen.

Dreamweaver CS4 also lets you move beyond Spry handling with its support for other web widget frameworks. Connect your page to a YUI calendar, for example, and you can link your data set to it. This isn't for the faint-hearted, but Dreamweaver CS4 adds support for JavaScript code-hinting of custom classes to help things along. And once you've connected up your inputs and output, there's a new Externalize JavaScript command that allows you to cleanly remove such logic from your pages. By installing Dreamweaver

CS4's AIR extension you can also repackage interactive data handling as

a standalone cross-platform desktop app.

Live and interactive

Previously, to see the results of such interactive JavaScript-based handling in action you needed to preview your page in your browser, but not any more. Hit the Live View command and your layout window provides a view of your current page just as it would appear in a browser, complete with all JavaScript-based interactivity, media playback, and so on. In fact, under Live View your layout window effectively becomes a real browser; Adobe has integrated the open source WebKit engine directly into Dreamweaver CS4.

Having such browser-based rendering immediately to hand is particularly helpful when you need to make changes to code that is state-dependent. For example, to see the effect of changes to a CSS-based rollover, you only need to click the Refresh button. Even better, by clicking the Live Code button you can see how the source code generated by the browser changes as you interact with the page. Click the Freeze JavaScript command and you can use the Code Navigator to see just which CSS rule is determining the current hover state, and jump directly to it.

It's all impressive stuff, and Dreamweaver CS4 again redefines the standard for hands-on web page authoring. However, redefining the standard causes its own problems. To begin with, this release sees support for a whole host of previous staples such as Layout Mode, Flash Text, Web Services, Site Map view and Timelines deprecated. That will disappoint some users, but Dreamweaver's range of support for other web technologies remains extraordinary. In fact, you could argue that it's too wide, adding complexity and losing focus. Certainly Microsoft Expression Web's (web ID: 197913) concentration on a few modern standards makes it seem comparatively fresh, simple and streamlined.

The problem for Dreamweaver goes deeper still. The nature of the web is changing radically: it's moving away from Dreamweaver's core focus on web pages crafted by the central designer towards data-driven web applications and third-party content creation. In both cases Dreamweaver still has a role to play, but it's much less central.