Again With the Change

Wow, we've had a lot to digest in the last week, haven't we? I am surprised by the number of international friends who have given us the "thumbs-up" in just the last dozen hours. But we will have a lot of time to adjust to things changing on the national, international and economic scene. But of more immediate import to us is the release of Adobe Creative Suite Four, and with it a new version of Dreamweaver.


Dreamweaver has grown up with the Web. It is what it is in large part because of the feedback of its users, who have complained, cajoled and wondered at every new release, and affecting the feature set and the workflow and nearly everything about the program. There has been a tendency lately for change to be incremental every several years and then Wham! there are very few familiar landmarks. Then the incremental improvement continues. We are now experiencing a whammy.

If you knew and loved Dreamweaver, you knew and loved Dreamweaver 2 even more. If you could work with Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver 2, Dreamweaver 3 presented little additional challenge, and so on.

What would have been Dreamweaver 6 was a Big Deal. Dreamweaver MX 2000 featured a new workspace and a new workflow. Things you needed were more readily available. Things you didn't need so much had been de-emphasized. Dreamweaver MX 2004 built upon that new platform and made it better. Dreamweaver 8 built upon that and we finished up with Creative Suite 3, and Dreamweaver CS3. If you knew Dreamweaver MX 2000, you could work within the CS3 environment.

Comes now Dreamweaver CS4. It features a reworked interface with a lot more options, and shows every evidence of a lot thought going into not only what we do, but how it all gets done. Where before we needed to navigate into our Sharedcode folders to find and edit footers and sidebars and such, now these (and other) documents are represented as buttons atop the workspace. Think of something you need to include in your footer? Just click the button for footer.html and that document is loaded up and ready to edit.

One frustrating thing over the past dozen years is that, in spite of how clever Design View is—you can drag and drop a photo over Design View and Dreamweaver will work out the image tag, the path information and so on—it still did only a fair job of approximating a "real" Web browser. We have struggled with Design Time Stylesheets and other hacks to try to make it better but the news is that now CS4 uses the WebKit engine, so you are very much in What You See Is What You Probably Get mode, now. In CS4 Design View, you can watch as menus change state when you hover over them! It's getting cooler and cooler out there, folks.

Another feature people have asked for, for years, is a split view that splits vertically. Now you can have Design View on the top and your code on the bottom, or your code on the left and Design View on the right.

Dreamweaver has always been good about bringing us Widgets, little ready-made gizmos that help to do complicated tasks simply—like building Tables and Forms and such. New in CS4 is a Forms Validation Widget, where you can sketch out, say, password limitations like every password must be at least so-many characters, or must contain at least two numbers, things like that.

Dreamweaver now believes the future belongs to standards-based markup, and to interactive technologies like AJAX. The Code Navigator and several new Coder workspaces are designed to help the hard-core feel more comfortable with Dreamweaver and may entice a few back from BBEdit, HomeSite and other page editors favored by Propeller Heads.

I am often asked about old versions of Dreamweaver. "Can I still use Dreamweaver MX 2004?" or "Do I need to upgrade? I'm using Dreamweaver 8, now" are questions that come up frequently. Normally I point out the differences and let them decide, but with Dreamweaver CS4, as with Dreamweaver MX 2000, I have to recommend that if you can afford it you upgrade right away. I don't think you'll be disappointed.