Macromedia Dreamweaver 3

Designing a web page by coding it yourself is no fun, but there are now dozens of WYSIWYG packages that make it as easy as desktop publishing. Dreamweaver is one of the easiest to use, and it's for that reason that it has found favour among amateurs and professionals alike.

If you have used an earlier edition, version three will feel familiar. On the surface it looks the same, but underneath there are a number of changes, including the addition of the new History palette.

As ever, the code it generates is clean and well structured, and if you launch the HTML editing window for a bit of manual tweaking, you should find it easy to follow what it has written. An improvement in this area is the inclusion of a fly-out menu for searching through your code and replacing the errors it finds.

If seeing this much code at once leaves you baffled, the Quick Tag Editor is there to help. This is far simpler to use, because by clicking on a page element and then launching the editor you'll see only the HTML tags that apply to that object. These can be edited in isolation of everything else and it will even suggest the words it thinks you are trying to enter - a great helping hand for the first-time coder.

Making mistakes is no longer a problem. The new History palette stores all your actions so you can simply roll them back, even past the point where you last saved your work.

It also saves time in another way, because all the actions on the palette can be saved to a file. So, if you always do the same thing to set up a menu at the top of each page, simply save those actions from the History palette and next time you need to build your menu, just load up the file - Dreamweaver does all the repetitive work for you.

Two new features will be of particular interest to business users. The ability to fully customise the interface means that the options open to users can be either restricted or tailored to suit a company's way of working, while a file-checking function ensures that you'll never get more than one person working on the same page at the same time, eliminating the danger of overwriting each other's changes.

If you use Microsoft Office then the chances are that at some point you will have tried building a page in Word. This does work, but it produces cluttered, complicated code full of proprietary tags that might not be understood by all browsers. Dreamweaver eliminates the problem with its Clean Up Word HTML function. In our tests this reduced the size of a Word-generated Web page by 50 per cent, and apart from a slight change in the formatting of a list to bring it in line with web coding conventions, it maintained the integrity of our page.

Dreamweaver's tools for image map creation are second to none. Clicking an image on your page adds the relevant tools to your context-sensitive properties bar and from there it's a simple matter of using them like any other drawing tool to define the map's hotspot areas. Filling in the blanks in the on-screen form tell the user's browser which pages the hotspots relate to.

Overall, we have no hesitation in recommending Dreamweaver. The code it creates is clean, easy to follow and fuss-free for guaranteed cross-browser compatibility, and the shortest possible download times.

Specifications

• Unlimited undos
• No need for HTML or other coding
• Quick Tag editor
• Image map creation
• Customisable interface
• Features for collaborative working

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See also:

Macromedia teams up with film director Tim Burton

Web design software specialist Macromedia has signed up hip film director Tim Burton to create short animations for its Shockwave.com website.  28 Jan 2000

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