DreamWeaver : Java Glossary

DreamWeaver CS 5.5 is Adobe’s (neé Macromedia’s) $400.00 USD Last revised/verified: 2010-12-07 DreamWeaver is the tool most professional webdesigners use for editing HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), especially HTML with embedded JSP (Java Server Pages), PHP (Pre-Hypertext Processor), ASP (Active Server Page), JavaScript or Cold Fusion. It lets you see the HTML tags (in the Code Inspector) and the rendered HTML side by side. You can edit either one, and see the changes reflected in the other view.

Rendering

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)

It has a combination of features that make it suitable for both technical and artistic people. You need both to design a good website. There are many features for embedding Ajax, JSP and other programatic tags. I don’t know what might be done to make it support html static macros. It has buttons for composing forms. A large percentage of the support is for Spry, Adobe’s Ajax package.

Advantages

• The most important feaure is the way you can click on an element in the design view, and then click on the code window and it takes you directly to the corresponding code. This is extremely useful in long, complex or repetitive documents.
• You can highlight a column in a table and apply a style to every element. Given that W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifies that colgroup must idiotically refuse to apply styles to elements in a column, this feature is extremely useful.
• It can convent documents between various DOCTYPES.
• It has a very picky syntax validator.
• It can clean up Word 2000+ junk HTML.
• Spell-checking shows you the word in context with entities rendered. It is so much easier that spell checking the code. Unfortunately the spell check has no undo. Once you add a word to the dictionary, it is in there. The spell check usually shows you the questionable word in context, a useful feature, but 10% of the time it is scrolled off screen.
• It can updates links when you move files.

Disadvantages

• Applying styles is a joke. You have to select from the huge list of possible styles scrolling one style at a time till you get to the one you want. It is much faster to just type them out in full. Even in DOS (Disk Operating System) days there were keystroke and mouse techniques to accelerate such selections. Dreamweaver does not even put the most recently used styles at the top. At least up and down arrow work. Applying styles is the bread and butter of an HTML editor. I give Dreamweaver an F- for this pathetic excuse for a user interface. I find it hard to believe a company like Adobe would have something so Mickey Mouse at the heart of such a mature product.
• It is ponderous to start up. You pretty well have to leave it running all the time.
• The rendering is quite crude compared with what a browser does. You can always preview in a real browser by hitting the F12 key or hitting Alt-F11 for live view, but then you can’t use that view to navigate to a spot in the code view.
• As you type it constantly makes suggestions about what it thinks you will type next. It lets you select from possibilities. These don’t slow you down when you don’t use them, and save keystrokes when you do.
• You can view the document four different ways, code, editable, live, and design. You can split the screen to see two views at once. The editable rendering is very approximate, but the live view is just like a real browser.
• Help is slow, required Internet-access and is all but useless. It might as well just be a Google in a browser.
• It does not keep tags in lower case, even when I configure it to.
• The commands ⇒ apply source formatting indents. It will also reflow if you configure wrap on. It does not insert-remove blank like like MicroEdge Visual Slick edit beautify. It does not remove nugatory space. It does not tidy the case of tags. And to top it off, it loses your place when you reformat. My Compactor program removes excess blanks, and fixes the case of tags, so those DreamWeaver failings are not as important to me.
• It does not highlight entities to let you know they are well-formed.
• It has extremely primitive and clumsy support for entities. It tends to use hex rather than named entities, and it supports only a handful. Further it meddles with existing documents converting named entities to hex.
• You have almost no ability to figure the formatting or the degree of pickiness of the syntax validation.
• It has so many advanced features that will just get in the way for most users. It should come configured for beginner, intermediate or advanced, and let you tune from there to hide the features you don’t need.
• You need to be able to add your own macros with icons for them to handle common tasks, like MicroEdge Visual SlickEdit.
• Even when you tell it to use lower case tags, it keeps generating them with random case. You have to manually find and correct them.
• You can’t click links to view other documents, even in the live view.
• It is very slow dealing with large documents, particulary running the source code tidy.

	recommend book⇒Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual
	by:	Danny Goodman	978-0-596-51043-5	paperback
	publisher:	Pogue Press
	published:	2007-06-01
The manual that should have come with Dreamweaver, a program used for editing HTML. Dreamweaver works especially well with JSP.
abe books anz abe books.co.uk abe books.de amazon.co.uk amazon.de abe books.ca iberlibro.com amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo abe books.fr abe books.com amazon.fr amazon.com abe books.it Barnes & Noble amazon.it powells.com o’reilly safari sony e-books
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock