Dreamweaver MX 2004 Quick Review
Killersites Newsletter Archive October 30th, 2003
The new Dreamweaver MX 2004 is out; ok this is old news, given that it has been out about 2 weeks now. But I just took a look at it and figured I would let you know what I think thus far.
My quick review
Over all I would say that it looks pretty good and is a nice upgrade from the previous version. The biggest change for me is the new support for CSS. The old version (Dreamweaver MX) had support for CSS and it wasn’t bad, but it was really a ‘sideshow’ whereas the new Dreamweaver MX 2004 makes CSS the center of the design process, as it should be.
It makes perfect sense that the focus has now shifted from traditional table based layout found in the previous versions of Dreamweaver to what we have today. CSS is now finally come of age with great support for it in all the browsers out there.
You can get a detailed review of the all the new cool CSS features right on Adobe’s site in the form of videos. They are worth watching as they quickly give you an overview of what the program can do. But for those of you who are dying to know, I will give up these points:
As hinted to when I said that Dreamweaver MX 2004 now makes CSS the center of the design process, the MX interface puts CSS options and view of the page (in CSS terms) right in your face.
You can inspect page elements and visually see the CSS rules applied to them in a dialogue box. This dialogue box (called an ‘inspector’) displays a list of the properties that are being used and those that can be used for the particular page element you are working with.
In the ‘codeview’ (a view of your page in code) you now have full support for CSS code completion and rule tips. Essentially what that means is when and if you are typing out your CSS rules (not that you have to with MX 2004) you will be presented with relevant CSS options as you write your code in the form of tool tips. This type of code completion functionality has been around in Dreamweaver for basic HTML editing for a while now, they just expanded it to include CSS syntax. Again, this is a good thing.
Besides making CSS coding easier for the CSS savvy, it can be a great help to people just learning CSS in that MX 2004 will guide you along the way in creating you first CSS pages. If you used Dreamweaver in it’s previous versions, you may have found that it’s split code view and design view capability was helpful since you could see the HTML Dreamweaver was creating as you built your page.
Beside the CSS features, another new thingy allows you to make edits to images without leaving Dreamweaver. They have included a part of the Fireworks engine (Fireworks is Macromedia's (now Adobe's) program for creating web graphics) for simple operations like adjusting tints and hue etc…
When I get a better look at it I will write a more detailed overview of the product.
Ok, I have a quick little code snippet for you
Have you ever been to web sites where when you fill in a form field to say join a mailing list, the form field sometimes 'knows' what you want to fill in and displays to you text values (like your email address) ?
This capability is called 'AutoComplete'. The browser basically keeps track of text values you have entered in previously (even on other web sites) and displays to you those text values when you begin filling in form elements of the same name. So if for example you came to killersites.com and entered your email address in a form field called 'email', the next time you visit a web site and begin to enter your email address in a form field named 'email' the browser will pick up on this and suggest to fill in the rest of your email address. This is great little convenience but it may not be something you want to enable on your web site for various reasons. To disable it all you need to do is enter in this code in your opening form tag:
<FORM AUTOCOMPLETE = "off">
The code: AUTOCOMPLETE = "off" - shuts this feature off for all the form elements in the form.
You can also turn autocomplete off for individual form elements by inserting the autocomplete=off code into the target form elements:
<INPUT TYPE = password AUTOCOMPLETE = "off" >
To answer a couple of questions
“Stef, you talk about how we should be using CSS in our web pages and forget about the 'old school' way of doing things, but I checked some of your pages and I see old school code in there?!”
Ok, you caught me! Actually there are reasons why you still find some 'old school' code in my web pages. In the original Creating Killer Website book site you will see that it is completely designed via old school techniques complete with font tags, table based layouts etc…
The reason its like that is because it’s an older site made in the days when you had to do this. Though the book and site has some dated information (there is still some good stuff in there too!), there are still a lot of people out there who are looking for the original website that goes with the book. As such I decided to keep it the way it was and archive it.
The rest of the web site uses a hybrid approach to web design combining both the traditional methods and the CSS methods because there are still some minor issues here and there with CSS; specifically fluid positioning of the page elements. Having said that, all new sections of killersites.com will be 100% CSS designed.
If you liked the article and you want to see more let me know!
Stefan Mischook.