Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks CS 3

Fireworks, also covered here, appears only in the two Web-prefixed suites and the Master Collection, as its intended use has subtly changed. Many expected it to disappear altogether in the face of competition from Photoshop and the embedded ImageReady optimisation tools.

Adobe Dreamweaver And Fireworks CS 3
Few people, if anyone, believed that GoLive would survive Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia. Dreamweaver was always the stronger, more widely-used product, commanding over three quarters of the market for professional web design. It has been the Gold Standard for some time, and was probably second only to Flash on Adobe's shopping list when it approached Macromedia with a merger in mind.It appears in three suites: Design Premium, Web Premium and Web Standard, showing how key web-based output is in this post-page-bound world. It is also a part of the Master Collection.Fireworks, also covered here, appears only in the two Web-prefixed suites and the Master Collection, as its intended use has subtly changed. Many expected it to disappear altogether in the face of competition from Photoshop and the embedded ImageReady optimisation tools. However, rather than being a simple editing and compression suite, Fireworks has a new, important role in prototyping site designs before they are fully coded in Dreamweaver.DreamweaverIf you're a first-time switcher from design to code view, there are plenty of helpful notes hidden behind the scenes. The code of the templated layouts is not only fully commented to explain best practice, but also full of tips and helpful hints, written in plain English. For example, 'Since the side columns em-based sizing is based on the user's default font size, you will want to be sure that background graphics in the columns take that into account. Built correctly, this is more accessible for those that need larger font sizes, since the width of the columns remains proportionate. If this is undesirable with your design, simply change the width to a pixel size and be sure to change the margins on the #mainContent div accordingly.'Other comments explain why some code, which may seem rather superfluous, is included, such as 'In the Internet Explorer Conditional Comment below, the zoom property is used to give the mainContent "hasLayout." This avoids several IE-specific bugs that may occur.'As a bonus, coding problems are now highlighted with green wavy underlines, like grammatical errors in Microsoft Word.There are no big surprises in Dreamweaver CS3's interface, which largely resembles previous versions. The Insert Bar at the top of the screen had some new additions, though, including a tab for the Spry framework for working with Ajax.Dreamweaver now makes it easier to change the way you're working in the middle of a job. If you started by defining your CSS inside your page, or you opened an existing page from another site and wanted to copy the formatting to your new site in the form of an external stylesheet, a dedicated button lets you shift the styling information our of your active page and into an attached document. The regular excellent reference work remains in place, with books from O'Reilly covering HTML, CSS, ASP.Net and other languages embedded into the application itself. There is also a powerful validation tool that links to Adobe's own CSS Advisor site, which both diagnoses problems and suggests solutions.A comprehensive CSS advisory site hosted on Adobe's servers bolsters Dreamweaver's in-built help system. The level of detail is impressive.None of this is particularly groundbreaking stuff. Neither is it a massive advance on what we already had in the last release. The real draw for serious developers, though - and the reason why it's worthy of an upgrade - is the newly-integrated Spry framework.I Spry...Spry is a JavaScript library written to simplify integrating Ajax features in a web page. It works to bind together a coded page and an underlying XML source, providing the kind of interactivity you'll have experiences through Gmail and Google Docs.This works in part through the familiar Bindings palette, which as with previous versions is where you set up symbolic links between your pages and a database, and through the Behaviours palette, through which you can add on-screen effects to various elements on your page.


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