Tuesday 27 Mar 2007 - 05:06
Dreamweaver may have bested GoLive as the visual Web design tool of choice, but as an almost two-year-old nag, Dreamweaver 8 was near to being ready for the glue factory.
Its CSS design tools were unapproachable to users from a design background -- and there was no support for the underlying technology behind how many ‘Web 2.0’ applications, Ajax.
Dreamweaver CS3 fixes both of these issues and makes them much easier for those of us who aren’t hardcore programmers to use them – though due to the complex nature of what CSS and Ajax are capable, working with the languages is never going to be as easy as old-school Web design in HTML.
As with Fireworks, Adobe has skipped upgrading Dreamweaver's interface -- due to time pressures apparently -- which is a shame as it's one of the easiest to get messy from Adobe and Macromedia's combine creative toolsets.
CSS on CS3
Almost all Web sites currently use CSS – it saved designers and developers from having to lay out sites with horrible, slow, pain-in-the-arse systems such as tables and frames. However, as code it’s a generation more complex than HTML.
To help newcomers take their first steps with CSS, Dreamweaver CS3's New Document dialog (above) offers a wide choice of CSS-based from templates adding sidebars, headers and footers to the standard black page -- just like the Frames layout options in the original Dreamweaver. These templates will also appeal to those looking to see up a CSS-based site quickly.
The created CSS code includes greyed-out descriptions for each element, which also include ‘good practice’ tips -- though experienced coders can hide this. You can also see all of the properties for the current element -- and those surrounding it -- in the unified CSS panel. There are useful helpers such as the ability to move CSS rules to another (new or existing) style sheet.
Spry game
The Spry framework for Ajax is Adobe’s take on the core layout technology behind those ‘Web 2.0’ sites that seem to be missing vowels, such as Gmail and Flickr. Ajax allows parts of pages to be changed without refreshing the whole page, improving a site’s ease-of-use. It’s short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but Adobe says that it’s Spry take on the technology is easy for designers to use, as it’s 99 per cent HTML.
In Dreamweaver CS3, Adobe has provided a series of pre-built components to make creating AJAX-based pages and sites easier and faster. These include data widgets such as XML data sets and tables, validation widgets, and user interface widgets such as menu bars and accordions. Semi-techie designers can modify these to create pages, while newcomers -- or those with no interest in coding – can build them into pages they design before passing them off to developers to make them work interactively.
There’s also a library of Spry effects that can be used even if you’re not working on a data-driven site. These are ‘visual transitions’ that will grow, shrink, highlight or fade page elements without a refresh.
No more Internet Exploder
Dreamweaver’s page testing system now includes a Browser Compatibility Check that’s designed to help you work around the idiosyncrasies -- bugs, unsupported features and the wilful ignoring of common standards -- of the various versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and others.
Your pages are checked against a regularly-updated list of known issues, with explanations of fixes available from the Adobe Web site. Problem code is highlighted with green underlines reminiscent of the grammar-checking system in Microsoft Word -- though it doesn’t check as you type.
Neil Bennett
For more information see the Adobe Web site.
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Neil Bennett
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