Macromedia Flash 8 Bible

What's New in Dreamweaver 8?

You may like to create your pages visually with drag-and-drop tools or prefer to get your hands dirty with the behind-the-scenes coding. Either way, Dreamweaver is a robust and flexible authoring tool. The new features in Dreamweaver 8 are too numerous to list here, but a few highlights include

• Interface update: The Dreamweaver interface has been modified to make it more space efficient and intuitive. The authoring environment updates are consistent with other Studio 8 programs, but Dreamweaver has multiple modes and some special tools and panels that facilitate authoring and visualizing content in a variety of formats.

• User-friendly coding environment: The most common code snippets are now right at your fingertips in a handy gutter toolbar along the side of the coding surface, rather than buried in menus. Code collapse can be used to hide or expand blocks of code by selection or based on tag, making it easier to stay focused when authoring and debugging.

• Support for additional formats: Dreamweaver 8 includes updated support for ColdFusion MX 7 and PHP 5, as well as an easy dialog-driven process for adding and customizing the presentation of Flash Video content.

• Improved CSS support: Dreamweaver 8 supports advanced CSS techniques, such as overflow, pseudo-elements, and form elements. The many panels used for working with CSS content in Flash MX 2004 have been consolidated into a new, centralized CSS panel, making it far easier to author, visualize, and render complex CSS-based layouts. You can use new design-time visual aids (that come with valuable tooltips) to outline CSS borders or color CSS layouts. Finally, the CSS style rendering toolbar supports previews of content for different CSS media types.

• XML integration tools: You can use a simple drag-and-drop workflow to add XML-based content, such as RSS feeds. You can also use Code view to customize the translation to HTML with improved code hinting for XML and XSLT.

• Convert or preserve Microsoft Word formatting: New pasting options enable you to retain source formatting on content created in Word or convert the text and apply existing CSS styles in the destination file.

• Enhanced performance: As with Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8 has been re-architected and optimized to improve performance for key tasks such as opening and saving files, switching context, or jumping in and out of the program. The promises made with MX 2004 have been fully realized with Studio 8.