What You Need to Know About Dreamweaver.

By Marlowe Graeme

About Dreamweaver: Dreamweaver is an application of web development that was created originally by Macromedia and which now is being developed by the Adobe Systems. Dreamweaver integrates web development's various aspects, including site management, web server tools and page creation with which a user can get a good perspective of the whole website. You can get Dreamweaver for both Windows Operation Systems and Mac. Recent versions of this application have also incorporated support for various web technologies like JavaScript, CSS and a number of frameworks and server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP and ColdFusion.

Features of Dreamweaver: The WYSIWYG mode of Dreamweavers can hide from the users, the pages' HTML codes, even though the application is a WYSIWYG hybrid and a web development and design application. This also helps the non coders to create web pages and sites. One can easily create the table based layout using the Dreamweaver application. The application's recent version also supports the standard based layout, enabling the conversion of 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: 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: Syntax Highlighting is supported by the latest versions of Dreamweaver for the languages like ActionScript, ASP.Net, Active Server Pages, C#, ColdFusion, Cascading Style Sheets, EDML, Extensible Markup Language, HyperText Markup Language, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, Java, JavaServer Pages, JavaScript, PHP, Visual Basic, VB Script and Wireless Markup Language. For many of the above mentioned languages, code completion is available and you can also add to its repertoire, your own language syntax highlighting.

Language Availability: The Adobe Dreamweaver comes in a number of languages like English, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, Swedish, French, Turkish, Brazilian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and Portuguese. - 33376

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