Macromedia Dreamweaver

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This article is about the web development program. For other uses of the word "Dreamweaver" or "Dream Weaver", see Dreamweaver (disambiguation).

Macromedia Dreamweaver is a web development tool, created by Macromedia (now Adobe Systems), which is currently in version 8. Initial versions of the application served as simple WYSIWYG HTML editors but more recent versions have incorporated notable support for many other web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting frameworks. Dreamweaver has enjoyed widespread success since the late 1990s and currently holds more than 70% of the HTML editor market.[1] The software is available for both the Mac and Windows platforms, but can also be run on Unix-like platforms through the use of emulation software such as Wine.

As a WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-experts to easily create web pages and sites. Some web developers criticize this approach as producing HTML pages that are much larger than they should be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards though this has improved considerably in recent versions. The most recent version of Dreamweaver (8) performs poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Macromedia has increased the support for CSS and other ways to layout a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in many browsers, provided that they are installed on their computer. It also has some site management tools, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters specified across the entire site, and a templatization feature for creating multiple pages with similar structures. The behaviors panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.

With the advent of version MX, Macromedia incorporated dynamic content creation tools into Dreamweaver. In the spirit of HTML WYSIWYG tools, it allows users to connect to databases (such as MySQL and Microsoft Access) to filter and display content using scripting technologies such as Active Server Pages(ASP), ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages(JSP), PHP, and more without any previous programming experience. Alternative solutions for web database application development are Alpha Five and FileMaker.

A highly regarded aspect of Dreamweaver is its extensible architecture. "Extensions", as they are known, are small programs, which any web developer can write (usually in HTML and Javascript) and anyone can download and install, which provide added functionality to the software. Dreamweaver is supported by a large community of extension developers who make extensions available (both commercial and free) for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

Syntax highlighting

As of version 8, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages:

• ActionScript
• Active Server Pages (ASP)
• ASP.NET
• C#
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• ColdFusion
• EDML
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
• Java
• JavaScript
• JavaServer Pages (JSP)
• PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
• Visual Basic (VB)
• Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)
• Wireless Markup Language (WML)

Versions

• Dreamweaver 1.0 (Released December 1997; Dreamweaver 1.2 followed in March 1998)
• Dreamweaver 2.0 (Released December 1998)
• Dreamweaver 3.0 (Released December 1999)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 (Released June 2000)
• Dreamweaver 4.0 (Released December 2000)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 (Released December 2000)
• Dreamweaver MX 6.0 (Released May 2002)
• Dreamweaver MX 2004 (Released September 10, 2003)
• Dreamweaver 8 (Released September 13, 2005)

See also

• List of HTML editors
• Macromedia HomeSite

External links

• DreamWeaver Offical Site
• Dreamweaver 8 Tutorials
• Macromedia Dreamweaver Extensions