Dreamweaver: Review

Review first published by WindoWatch.com

Having spent since late '94 using text editors to build web pages, I've come to expect certain things. The most important is that any web page I write only changes when I want it to. With a text editor, you always have complete control over your web page.

Now with some visual HTML editors, this does not hold true. I've experimented with loading pages into both Netscape and Microsoft products and then saving the result. The page may or may not still look the same, but the HTML behind the page almost always has been changed. Merely opening the page in some editors *automatically* changes your HTML even if you make no edits of your own on that page. If you have gone to the time and expense of building a valid web site, you don't really want semi-random changes to that site.

Dreamweaver is a powerful tool for developing and maintaining web sites that will respect your HTML. The full commercial package includes a lot of tutorial information to help you start your web sites, and either Homesite 4.0 (for PCs) or BBEdit 5.0 (for Macs) which are stand-alone text based editors. Having both a good visual editor and a good text editor in one package can be a real advantage for a small company. It will give people a choice of tools to use, and some will prefer one to the other.

Use the tutorial

One of the most important things about Dreamweaver is that it comes with an excellent tutorial as part of the help. This will call up your browser and teach you a lot about using the package. This review is only going to touch on a few things. To get full use out of the tutorial, you should have a shockwave capable browser. It uses small, embedded shockwaves to demonstrate the steps of some of the more complicated processes. The manual covers much of the same material, but that you can use without a computer.

Floating windows

Dreamweaver has a large number of floating windows available. The floating windows can be turned off at any time, and restarted by selecting it from the Window menu. I'll cover the windows that Dreamweaver displays when you first start it. Others will appear as you do more complex things such as create Timelines or Behaviours.

There is the main edit window. This shows you what your page will look like as you create it and make changes. The menu bar at the top allows you to insert HTML elements, create layers, add in behaviors and timelines etc. For people who need to see their web page as they work on it, this will be the most important window in the package.

The object window first appears on the left side of the screen, and allows you to insert common objects (ie images or shockwaves), form objects (fields, buttons), head objects (style sheet links or meta statements) and invisible objects (line breaks, non-breaking spaces.) Click the small arrow to select the category of object, then click the object to insert. The little x closes the window. The tutorial explains how to edit this window to show your favourite or most used objects.

The launcher window usually appears toward the top right of your screen. From the launcher, you can access the major functions of site manager, library (where you may store frequently used and updated pieces of HTML to be inserted into a page. Also templates, which will be discussed later.), styles (style sheet editor), behavior (add interactivity to specific items on the page), timeline (move things around on the page), HTML (edit the page at the tag level).

The properties window appears along the bottom of your screen. It allows you to easily edit the properties of any item on your page by selecting that item then using the window to change information. For some items, such as images, you can expand that window to get more options. Expanding the window for an image allows you to create an image map very easily.

Other Features

Templates and library items are used to store information that you need to use in many pages. A template has regions you set up, some of which you allow editing, some of which are fixed. Fixed regions can only be updated in the template, then Dreamweaver will update *all* pages using that template at one time. An easy way to control a look and feel for a site. Library items are similar, you update the item to update the pages. But this is for smaller pieces of code, not the entire page layout.

I'll leave it to interested readers to download and try the Dreamweaver behaviors and timeline. The tutorial does thoroughly cover the information you'll need to do that and this goes beyond what I wanted to cover. Do note, these effects work best in recent browsers, don't depend on them for critical items that you want everyone to use.

Site management - Dreamweaver site management allows you to have online and offline copies of material, and it can track changes to update the site itself. This allows you to make certain changes site-wide, and view your web site as a tree structure.

Link Checker - one of those small functions that can make a big difference if you are used to doing things by hand. If you link check on a set of pages, you will get back a report on broken links, external links and orphaned pages (no links to it from any of your other pages.)

Program Oddities

Dreamweaver does have its quirks. It's safer to first choose a header, then start typing then to select part of a paragraph to call a header. The second method is likely to make the whole paragraph turn to a header. Also, I find that it is sometimes hard to determine where to insert things, I have to take a quick peek at the HTML. And having a drop down menu that suggests it is safe or meaningful to have a font size increase -> +7 is scary (1 to 7 usually represents the *entire* range of font sizes available to a browser.) The manual *does* mention that style sheets are a better way to specify font sizes, which is very true.

I do not like the style sheet editor. I find it too confusing and difficult. The principles of style sheets are simple enough, but the way Dreamweaver has it set up, I keep getting lost. You have to know the attributes that can be changed by a style sheet pretty well before this tool makes sense.

Conclusion

Overall though, Dreamweaver is an excellent package. Templates allow you to design a basic page structure that will be inforced on every page from the template. Macromedia even has a set of pre-built templates for downloading if you want a starting point. The package has a lot of options, but running through the tutorial should help anyone learn how to use it. As you can tell from this, Dreamweaver is a powerful program. It's probably overkill on a small site, or one that doesn't require a lot of dynamic behaviours.