Dreamweaver 4 is good, but there's room for improvement
Written: May 25 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good site management tool, easy to use WYSIWYG interface
Cons: not the best HTML formatting, not a good editor for high-end users
The Bottom Line: If you're working on a site of any size, this will help. If you just need an text editor, you may want to shop around.
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| jeffdiaz's Full Review: Adobe Dreamweaver 2 Full Version Academic, Not For... |
Initial Thoughts
I've used both Dreamweaver 3 and 4 over the past few years. It is by far the best product I've worked with when it comes to managing web sites. In my work, I've had to maintain a few fairly hefty sites, a task that just couldn't have been done manually. Dreamweaver is perfect for this type of situation. It has the ability to create templates from which you can base all of your HTML. This is a handy feature. You can create areas within your page that are editable and areas that cannot be touched. This even helps if you want to hand off the content entry of your site to someone that doesn't know or understand HTML as they won't be able to break anything.
As far as WYSIWYG editors are concerned, Dreamweaver is by far my favorite. I was a hard-core straight text editor just a few years ago. I would only use vi (a text editor for Unix) to code my pages. While I was very good at it, there's no beating the ability to imbed a few tables within one another with the click of a button. I almost exclusively create the design of my sites within this WYSIWYG environment. Dreamweaver does a fantastic job of giving you exactly what you design. It also highlights tags which aren't opened or closed properly allowing you to zoom in on syntactic errors rather quickly.
Dreamweaver's only real problem is its text editing abilities. It does give you the text editor, which you can split-screen with the WYSIWYG (a nice feature), but this editor is minimal, with no text highlighting. It does provide some formatting abilities like auto-indenting, but even this doesn't work as well as it should. It would indent using tabs even though I had specified that I wanted my indents to use spaces. The full version of Dreamweaver comes bundled with a registered version of Allaire's Homesite, however, which makes up for Dreamweaver's editing problems. Macromedia and Allaire have even merged recently, so hopefully the Homesite editor will be built into Dreamweaver in its next revision. With that there would be no contest that it's the best product.
More Benefits of Dreamweaver
CSS abilities are integrated into Dreamweaver, although some browser specific styles are left off. This however makes including styles in your documents a breeze. You can define each style with their style picker. A very nice tool. Then all you need to do is highlight an area and pick the style you wish to use. Dreamweaver takes care of the rest by placing the highlighted area into a span tag or even making use of tags that already exist and simply adding a class to it.
Simple JavaScript is just a click away. You can quickly set up image rollovers by clicking the JavaScript palette and selecting "swap image". A very handy feature.
One thing that all sites need, especially these days, is good spell checking. Dreamweaver has this ability too. And it's smart enough to only spell check the actual content and not the html tags too.
All in all this is a great product. It won me over from straight text coding, but it's not a replacement for text coders, just a tool. If you use it right, by combining its strengths with a good text editor, you will lower your development time and increase the quality of your work. I know that sounds like a bad manager talking, but it's true.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jeffdiaz
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Location: Jacksonville, FL
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
All around computer guy (focusing on the Internet right now).
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