Dreamweaver/Fireworks 3 Studio

Features: Dreamweaver

- Site Management

The first important features of Dreamweaver are the quite extensive Site Management features. Manage all parts of your site - automatically generate sitemaps - work with other designers on the same site - and synchronize your local work folders with the uploaded website. They're all features that will ease the workflow and help you whip up a better site, in less time.

- DHTML

DHTML was introduced with Netscape and Explorer browsers 4 and above, and allowed the use of layers, cascading style sheets, and above all, animation. Although few websites are DHTML animated, the feature has been with Dreamweaver since version 1, and has now grown up into a strong and easy-to-use feature.

This is what I came up with after 1 minute's work with DHTML.

- "Clean up HTML"

Sometimes, when working with long HTML documents, applying colors, fonts and sizes again and again, there will be duplicates of each HTML tag. Sometimes, this result in errors in your browser, or even faulty code. Other HTML editors like Frontpage may even corrupt your HTML code.

Dreamweaver will clean it all up! It will combine tags, remove unnecessary tags, remove comments if you choose, and apply a nicely readable source formatting.

If you've ever worked with the web-publishing features in Microsoft Word, you'll know that it applies hundreds of unnecessary tags. This results in larger filesizes and increased download times. Sometimes your Word HTML doesn't work in Netscape browsers.

Now, in Dreamweaver 3, you can clean up Word 97/98/2000 HTML. Here's an example results window from one such clean-up.

Extending Dreamweaver

You can extend the features of Dreamweaver with freely downloadable objects and behaviours from the Macromedia website.

Some of the features can greatly enhance the Dreamweaver functionality. Features such as "Fullscreen", "Random Images", and even "Guestbook" allow you to create quite advanced interactivity using point and click.

History Palette

Inspired by the Photoshop 5 counterpart - the Dreamwaver History palette allows you to go back and forth between executed actions. You can even record your actions and "play" them on other sites.

Let's take a look at the Fireworks features...