by Errol Merv

About Dreamweaver: Created originally by Macromedia and presently by Adobe Systems, Dreamweaver is an application of web development. Various aspects of web development like page creation, web server tools and site management is integrated by Dreamweaver, with the help of which users are able to get a good perspective of the full website. The application’s recent versions have also given support for a number of web technologies like JavaScript, CSS and several frameworks and serverside scripting languages like ColdFusion, PHP and ASP. Dreamweavers come for both Windows Operating Systems and Mac.

Features of Dreamweaver: Even though Dreamweaver is an application of web development and design which is code based and is a WYSIWYG hybrid, the WYSIWYG mode can hide the pages’ HTML codes from the users which help even the non coders to create sites and web pages. With the Dreamweaver application, it is quite easy to create table based layouts. The latest versions of the application have a focus on supporting the standard based layout, which can convert tables to layers.

Dreamweaver helps users in previewing websites in the web browsers that were locally installed. It has tools of site management like WebDAV, FTP/SFTP synchronization features and file transfer, templating features allowing the shared code’s source update and layout of the entire sites without scripting or server side includes, and the ability of finding and replacing code or text lines by regular expressions and search terms across the whole site.

Dreamweaver can utilize the third party ‘extensions’ to enable and extend the main functionality of the application. For most of the tasks of web developments, like simple effects of rollover to fully featured shopping carts, Dreamweaver is supported by many extension developers, making the free and commercial extensions available. Dreamweaver can also edit the files locally, and using FTP, WebDAV and SFTP, upload these files into the remote web server, like the other HTML editions.

Drawbacks: A drawback of Dreamweaver is its having the potential of producing HTML pages whose HTML code amount and file size are larger than what would be a page that is optimally hand coded, causing the poor performance of web browsers. Dreamweaver has also been criticized in the past by some website developers for producing code which many times do not comply with the standards of W3C. The Dreamweaver 8.0 has had a poor performance on the Acid 2 Test which was developed by Web Standards Project.

Syntax Highlighting: Syntax Highlighting is supported by the latest versions of Dreamweaver for the languages like ActionScript, ASP.Net, Active Server Pages, C#, ColdFusion, Cascading Style Sheets, EDML, Extensible Markup Language, HyperText Markup Language, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, Java, JavaServer Pages, JavaScript, PHP, Visual Basic, VB Script and Wireless Markup Language. For many of the above mentioned languages, code completion is available and you can also add to its repertoire, your own language syntax highlighting.

Language Availability: Various languages in which the Adobe Dreamweaver is available are English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and Brazilian.

About the Author:
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