What You Need To Know About Dreamweaver.

Posted by Cappadonna on Sunday, November 7, 2010

By Marlowe Graeme

About Dreamweaver: Originally produced by Macromedia and currently by the Adobe Systems, Dreamweaver is an application for web development. With the help of Dreamweaver, which integrates different aspects of web development including site management, page creation and web server tools, users can get a good outlook of the whole website. Various technologies like JavaScript, CSS and several frameworks and serverside scripting languages like ASP, ColdFusion and PHP have been given support by the new versions of the application. Both Windows Operating Systems and Mac supports Dreamweaver.

Features of Dreamweaver: Even though Dreamweaver is an application of web development and design which is code based and is a WYSIWYG hybrid, the WYSIWYG mode can hide the pages' HTML codes from the users which help even the non coders to create sites and web pages. With the Dreamweaver application, it is quite easy to create table based layouts. The latest versions of the application have a focus on supporting the standard based layout, which can convert tables to layers.

The locally installed websites in the web browsers can be previewed by the users using Dreamweaver. Site management tools like FTP, SFTP and WebDAV features of synchronization and file transfers, templating features which help in the source update of shared code and layout of the whole sites without the server side includes and scripting, are present in this application. It also has the ability to use regular expressions and search items to find and replace code or text lines across the full site.

Dreamweaver helps users in previewing websites in the web browsers that were locally installed. It has tools of site management like WebDAV, FTP/SFTP synchronization features and file transfer, templating features allowing the shared code's source update and layout of the entire sites without scripting or server side includes, and the ability of finding and replacing code or text lines by regular expressions and search terms across the whole site. Dreamweaver can enable and extend the application's core functionality by utilizing third party 'extensions', which can be written by any web developer. A large number of extension developers who make both free and commercial extensions available, support Dreamweaver for most tasks of web developments, from fully featured shopping carts to simple effects of rollover. Dreamweaver, like the other HTML editors, can edit files locally and upload all the edited files into the remote web server by using WebDAV, FTP and SFTP.

Drawbacks: A drawback of Dreamweaver is its having the potential of producing HTML pages whose HTML code amount and file size are larger than what would be a page that is optimally hand coded, causing the poor performance of web browsers. Dreamweaver has also been criticized in the past by some website developers for producing code which many times do not comply with the standards of W3C. The Dreamweaver 8.0 has had a poor performance on the Acid 2 Test which was developed by Web Standards Project.

Syntax Highlighting: For several languages like Action Script, Active Server Pages, ASP.NET, EDML, Cascading Style Sheets, C#, ColdFusion, Java, Java Server Pages, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, HyperText Markup Language, Extensible Markup Language, JavaScript, PHP, Visual Basic, Wireless Markup Language, and VB Script, the recent versions of Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting. You can add to its selection, language syntax highlighting of your own. Code completion is also available for some of the above mentioned languages.

Language Availability: The Adobe Dreamweaver comes in several languages like English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Japanese, Portuguese, Brazilian, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional.

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