Software Review:
Macromedia Dreamweaver
By David
Fiedler
Dreamweaver takes some getting used to.
Oh, the demos look fantastic, and in the hands of an expert,
it's clear that it looks like it can do almost anything. It does
have a bit of a learning curve, especially for Windows users,
and some of the procedures for doing relatively simple things
-- like setting up animation behaviors -- are not completely drag-and-drop
intuitive. And yet it's one of the coolest programs to come down
the pike, especially in the hands of a serious designer/coder.
The hot ticket here is Dreamweaver's mastery of Dynamic HTML,
from animations to behaviors to layers. If you have a 4th generation
browser, you've already noticed some interesting things about
this page; move your mouse around and you'll find some more.
What really takes getting used to is that a company would come
up with a tool this powerful, then design it with open architecture
so you can configure virtually every aspect of its operation,
rather than setting things up so you'd be forced to upgrade it
in 4 months.
What Are We Dealing With Here?
Let's back up a little. Dreamweaver
is the new Dynamic HTML editor/page design tool (with a bit of
site management thrown in for good measure) from Macromedia,
those wonderful folks who brought you Director and Flash and a
couple of other useful things. Its price has just been reduced to $299 (estimated), and it
comes with either Bare Bones Software's BBEdit 4.5 or Allaire's
HomeSite 3.0, depending on whether you're using Mac or Windows
software.
Dreamweaver isn't completely free-form WYSIWYG in the sense that
you can take a piece of text, snare it, and move it willy-nilly
anywhere on the page. Instead, its main view is of the page, more
or less as it would appear in a browser. Type in text and arrange
it with tables and images and other objects to wrap around. You
edit text, tables, frames, and everything else right in this view
and never see HTML. This is pretty much as intuitive as you can
get.
Click the thumbnail so you can see what's going
on!
The HTML code is there for your inspection, literally, anytime
you want to open the HTML Inspector window, just one click away.
And when you do look at it, you will find hard to believe that
code this tight was generated automatically. Dreamweaver also
has the most elegant handling of the absolute-versus-relative
URL addressing problem I've seen, and it works very well.
Dreamweaver's frame handling is very neat. You just tell it you
want to view frame borders, and blam, there they are. Then just
drag them to the size and orientation you want, and Dreamweaver
creates a frameset for you. Even I found this to be fun and painless,
and I'm a frame-hater from way back.
Jump
to Part 2 of this article.
This article first appeared in March 1998.
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