New Features In Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

A lot of software upgrades are not really worth buying, being over-priced and often full of bugs. Dreamweaver upgrades, however, always tend to be worth getting.

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.

Dreamweaver is now part of Adobe’s Creative Suites, so part of the upgrade will simply be cosmetic, but what else have Adobe come up with in their first upgrade of this industry-standard web development tool.

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.

Dreamweaver has long had great features for integrating content with Fireworks. This new version extends a similar level of integration with the more widely-used Adobe Photoshop. Documents, slices or selections can be copied from Photoshop and pasted straight into Dreamweaver. An Image Preview window then appears in which compression and optimisation settings may be specified before the image is saved.

Dreamweaver now has support for Ajax, a programming model which uses various technologies, including JavaScript, to create fast, interactive web applications that respond to user actions by sending and receiving data to and from a server and refreshing elements of a web page without first having to reload that page. The Spry Framework, included in Dreamweaver CS3 is a collection of JavaScript code which offers developers a painless way of adding simple Ajax content to their pages.

Dreamweaver’ Spry content is divided into three categories called widgets, special effects and data sets. The widgets offer several different interface elements such as tabbed panels which allow designers to display content in a given part of the page which changes when the user clicks a particular tab. Other widgets include form validation utilities which check data entered into elements on a form and menus and sub-menus for navigation.

Spry effects work on most HTML elements. In response to user actions, they will do things like fading, zooming or shrinking an element. The kind of stuff traditionally done using Flash.

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.

Dreamweaver CS3 is also the first version of the program to offer compatibility with Intel-based and PowerPC Macintosh systems. It also runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista systems.