Dreamweaver Article

Dreamweaver 8 New Features and Benefits

Dreamweaver 8 New Features and Benefits Overview—Best Practices

We think of best practices as the technologies and development methodologies to enable users to develop great, standards-compliant web applications quickly and efficiently. Working with best practices insures that your sites will enable users to push the envelope of the web, while rendering well all in browsers and reducing maintenance costs.

One thing came through loud and clear from our conversations with customers—they look to Dreamweaver to help them get started with web technologies, to help them learn how to work with the latest technologies and to grow with them as they grow. This is really the legacy of Dreamweaver and why designers and developers think of Dreamweaver as the industry standard. With this release, we focused where our users are focusing and added advanced CSS authoring support and revolutionary support for XML integration.

What is CSS? Cascading Style Sheets is a web language that controls the presentation and positioning of web-based content. CSS is the W3C-recommended way to separate presentation from content. With CSS, designers can create style sheets that define how different elements, such as headers and links, appear. These style sheets can then be applied to any web page. The benefits of working with CSS are:

• Simplification: This separation of presentation and content simplifies maintenance, because changing something once in a style sheet means it changes everywhere.
• Cost Savings: Using CSS means lighter HTML pages, because they don't include redundant presentational information, so transmission cost is reduced.
• Expressiveness: This one is really my favorite. The languages of the web—such as HTML haven’t evolved significantly since the late nineties, but the creativity of our customers knows no bounds. Over the past few years, browsers have continued to evolve their support for CSS, which allows web designers and developers to explore new ground and push their creative limits by using CSS.

With the release of Dreamweaver MX 2004, we really integrated CSS into the workflow of all users by making it easier to use CSS to control the presentation of text on the page. The response to this functionality has been overwhelmingly positive and as a result, there is a lot of interest among our users in taking their CSS skills to the next level and using CSS for the positioning of content on their page.

A second big area of investment in the best practices front for this release is XML. Over the course of the past few years, we've seen an increased interest among web designers and developers in working with XML, mostly because of the syndication revolution on the web—with individuals and companies making content available for syndication as RSS, a flavor of XML. For example, you can syndicate the business section of the New York Times by pointing to their daily XML-based RSS feed, or add content from the principal's blog to the main page of a school's site to keep everyone up to date.

Organizations, such as the Federal Government, are in the process of moving to XML-based data over the course of the next few years to take advantage of the structure and control XML provides.

Although XML has been a W3C recommendation since 1998, many web designers and developers have found it hard to work with. To date, tools to author the XSL transformations have, for the most part, been expensive, specialized IDEs that offer much more functionality than the average web developer needs.

Today, with Dreamweaver, we make it drag-and-drop simple.

Dreamweaver 8 provides unparalleled support for best practices and industry standards, including support for advanced CSS usage, XML and RSS feeds, and accessibility requirements.

Work with Best Practices

New Feature	Description
Visual authoring with XML data	Get up to speed with XML using powerful, visual tools to integrate valuable feeds into work and remove the mystery from XML to HTML translation. Integrate XML-based data, such as RSS feeds into web pages using a simple drag-and-drop workflow. Jump to Code view to customize the transformation, using improved code hinting for XML and XSLT.
New, unified CSS panel	The new, unified CSS panel provides a one-stop shop for learning, understanding, and working with the CSS styles applied to pages in a visual way. All the CSS functionality is consolidated into one panel set and enhanced to make working with CSS easier and more productive. The new interface makes it easier to see the cascade of styles applied to a specific element and easily identify where attributes are defined. A property grid allows for quick edits.
CSS layout visualization	Apply visual aids at design time to outline CSS layout borders or color CSS layouts to reveal complex nesting schemes and improve selection. Click the CSS layout, for valuable tooltips, such as its ID and padding, margin, and border settings to better understand the elements that are controlling the design.
Style rendering toolbar	View content the same way end-users will see it, no matter what the delivery mechanism, with new support for CSS media types in Dreamweaver 8. Use the style rendering toolbar to toggle to Design view and see how it will look in print, on a handheld, or on a screen.
CSS rendering improvements	Match how complex CSS layouts will render in most browsers, with substantial improvements in Design view accuracy. Dreamweaver now fully supports advanced CSS techniques, such as overflow, pseudo-elements, and form elements.
Accessibility: Support for WCAG/W3C priority 2 checkpoints	In addition to the integrated accessibility evaluation tool for Section 508 and WCAG Priority 1 checkpoints, Dreamweaver now supports both CSS and accessibility with an updated evaluation tool that includes WCAG Priority 2 checkpoints.
Improved WebDAV	WebDAV in Dreamweaver 8 now supports digest authentication and SSL for secure file transfer and offers improved connectivity with a wider array of servers.

To start preparing yourself for the new XML features, read Marius Zaharia’s XML Overview article.

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