Taking a Good Look at Dreamweaver.
About Dreamweaver: Created originally by Macromedia and presently by Adobe Systems, Dreamweaver is an application of web development. Various aspects of web development like page creation, web server tools and site management is integrated by Dreamweaver, with the help of which users are able to get a good perspective of the full website. The application’s recent versions have also given support for a number of web technologies like JavaScript, CSS and several frameworks and serverside scripting languages like ColdFusion, PHP and ASP. Dreamweavers come for both Windows Operating Systems and Mac.
Features: Though Dreamweaver is a hybrid WYSIWYG and an application of code based web development and design, its WYSIWYG mode is able to hide from the users, the pages’ HTML code details which make the creation of sites and web pages possible even for non-coders. The creation of table based layouts is very easy with this application. In the recent versions, the application has focused on supporting the standard based layout with the ability of converting tables to layers.
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.
The third party ‘extensions’ can be used by Dreamweaver for enabling and extending the application’s main functionality. Many extension developers, who make available the free and commercial extensions, support Dreamweaver for many web development tasks ranging from fully featured shopping carts to simple effects of rollover. Also the files can be edited locally by Dreamweaver, and using WebDAV, SFTP and FTP, upload them into the remote web server similar to the other HTML editions.
Drawbacks of Dreamweaver: HTML pages produced by Dreamweaver may have file size and the code amount of HTML, larger than a page that has been optimally hand coded. This causes the web browsers to act poorly, which is a drawback. Earlier, Dreamweaver also used to produce codes which many times would not comply with the standard of W3C. Also, there has been a bad performance by Dreamweaver 8.0 on the Acid 2 Test which was developed by Web Standards Project.
Syntax Highlighting: For many languages like Active Server Pages, ASP.NET, Action Script, EDML, ColdFusion, Cascading Style Sheets, C#, Extensible Markup Language, Java, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, HyperText Markup Language, JavaScript, PHP, Java Server Pages, Wireless Markup Language, Visual Basic and VB Script, the latest Dreamweaver versions support syntax highlighting. You can add to its selection, your own language syntax highlighting, and code completion is also available for several 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.
