(Windows) Macromedia Dreamweaver 8

With over 3.5 million users, Dreamweaver dominates the world of professional web authoring in much the same way that Photoshop dominates photo-editing. It has 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 is these same three core areas – visual design, coding and productivity - that are targeted in this latest release.

In terms of wysiwyg design power, Dreamweaver 8 now falls into line with GoLive by offering a zoom capability - ranging between 6% and 3600%! – and Fit All, Fit Width and Fit Selection commands. The importance of this is seriously overplayed as web design is always viewed at 100%, but it should help users working on high resolution screens and possibly when aligning objects. Much more practically useful for accurately positioning layouts is the new support for rulers and draggable guides complete with tooltips for providing feedback on position and distances between. 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.

New zoom and guide options boost Dreamweaver 8’s visual layout capabilities.

Other improvements to Dreamweaver’s wysiwyg design power 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 aides are available to highlight CSS outlines, boxes and backgrounds while new tooltips provide greater feedback. Most impressive is Dreamweaver 8’s new 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 Dreamweaver 8’s 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 style sheets associated with the page as a whole and those feeding in to the current selection’s formatting. It’s a very efficient system providing feedback and editability and shows Dreamweaver at its streamlined best. Even so I think Macromedia is making too much of its “new” CSS features as, apart from the ability to limit the display to properties that have already been set, most power was already there in MX 2004, it’s just been rationalized.