The Great New Features Offered By Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Many software upgrades offer poor value for money and many have bugs. However, there are some upgrades which always worth having. Adobe Dreamweaver upgrades tend to be of this type.

Since Dreamweaver Is a web development tool, new features tend to reflect changes in the web technology, such as the growing importance of CSS. It’s not usually just a case of introducing a few snazzy new tools for the sake of it.

Since the release of Dreamweaver 8, way back in 2005, the use of cascading style sheets (CSS) in web page layout has become widely recognised as the way forward. However, CSS page layout coding can be a little daunting for new web designers. Dreamweaver CS3 includes a wide range of customisable CSS layouts which include useful comments for inexperienced developers explaining how the designs function. The layouts may be used not only to create individual pages but also Dreamweaver templates.

Manipulation of CSS code has also been made easier with the addition of features for reorganising styles and transferring them between style sheets. Users can now automatically transfer an inline CSS style to a style sheet or convert an embedded style sheet into an external one.

The new browser compatibility feature in Dreamweaver CS3 allows users to check for issues within their pages relating to specific browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape). It creates a report explaining problems which may occur when CSS on your pages is rendered in a particular browser.

The last time Dreamweaver was upgraded, Photoshop was a rival to Macromedia’s own Fireworks. Now that Dreamweaver and Photoshop are part of the same stable, Adobe has enhanced their compatibility. You can now copy a slice, selection or entire document from Photoshop, move over to Dreamweaver and paste it. This brings up a special window which enables to optimise and save the copied pixels as a new image.

The fact that Dreamweaver and Photoshop are now both Adobe products is reflected a new level of compatibility between the two programs. It is now possible to make a selection in Photoshop, or to select a slice, copy it, switch to Dreamweaver and paste. The selection will automatically be converted into a web image and a new window will appear offering you a series of options for optimising the image. Dreamweaver CS3 also embraces the new Ajax technology. Ajax is a programming model which allows developers to create extremely interactive pages which are constantly refreshed with content loaded from a server but without reloading the page. Dreamweaver’s version of Ajax is through the Spry framework. This is a collection of JavaScript routines which can be inserted on the page and automatically generate all the necessary code.

There are three types of Spry content: widgets, special effects and data sets. Spry Widgets are clickable page elements which respond to user interaction in funky ways. For example, there is a tabbed panel widget which displays different content in the same part of the page depending on which tab the user clicks on. There are also widgets for creating navigational menus and submenus and for validating text fields, text areas and select elements on a form.

Spry effects can be applied to a wide range of HTML elements. They allow designers to have images and other page content fade, shrink, zoom etc. in response to actions carried out by the user such as moving the mouse pointer over a particular element.

Spry data sets will bring in data from an external XML data source and display it on the page. Data sets offer a drill-down facility whereby users can click on information already displayed to bring up more detailed information on that particular item somewhere else on the page.

Adobe has not forgotten Mac users in this upgrade either. Dreamweaver CS3 now has Intel-based Mac Compatibility. This makes CS3 the first version of Dreamweaver to run natively on Intel-based Macs (as well as PowerPCs).

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