What WYSIWYG should be. (Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0)

Member Name: TheKnight

Product:	Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0
Date:	29/07/00 (152 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A realistic WYSIWYG solution to web design of professional standard.

Disadvantages: None worth a mention apart from the price (which is excellent value for what it does).

Macromedia Dreamweaver is the minimum standard you should expect of a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML editor. It is not just a web page editor, it is designed to work with entire sites. It will keep track of what you update between uploads, your links (making sure that broken links are not a problem), and perform many other tasks that make building and managing a website into as painless a business as possible.

Dreamweaver is not just for those who don't know HTML. It is used by many professional webmasters because it allows for speedy web development. Adding tables, forms or roll-over buttons (the button images that change when you move the mouse pointer over them) takes just seconds.

Dreamweaver is more expensive than Microsoft's rival product FrontPage, but it is likewise far more advanced and able. Pound for pound, I believe that Dreamweaver offers much more value for money than FrontPage. Dreamweaver doesn't make all its best features only work on servers using Microsoft software.

Dreamweaver allows you to change HTML code by hand as well, and doesn't change anything back that it disagrees with. You don't have to use special 'WebBot' codes to prevent the editor from changing code it doesn't understand either (FrontPage is well known for that problem).

Dreamweaver includes support for advanced features (such as Server Side Includes) as well as javascript and DHTML, and has several useful wizards to create mouseover effects, dynamic layers, and browser specific redirects (forwarding specified browsers to specified pages automatically).

Dreamweaver allows you to check the compatibility of various HTML features against the support for older browser software. This is a nice feature when you consider that there are many users of WebTV around now (which is roughly equal to a version 2 browser) who may not see the background colours of specific table cells, or frames, etc.
r>Dreamweaver has a slightly steeper learning curve than FrontPage. This is partly due to the fact that FrontPage is a simpler and less sophisticated piece of kit, and partly that FrontPage has some basic similarities to other Microsoft programs such as Word or Publisher that you may already be familiar with.

However, Dreamweaver is still a very useful means to make professional standard websites quickly and easily. It is quite capable of use by people who know nothing about HTML, but for best results, a webmaster should always know how to do it all by hand as well.