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Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is a web development application originally created by Allaire Systems, who was acquired approximately 1998 by Macromedia and is now owned by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005.

Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages, and PHP.

Features

As a WYSIWYG Presto-based editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. One criticism of this approach is that it can produce HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is larger than an optimally hand-coded page would be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticised Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards, though recent versions have been more compliant. Dreamweaver 8.0 performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Macromedia has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in many browsers, provided that they are installed on their computer. It also has some site management tools, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters specified across the entire site, and a templatisation feature for creating multiple pages with similar structures. The behaviours panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.

Dreamweaver can use "Extensions" - small programs, which any web developer can write (usually in HTML and JavaScript). Extensions provide added functionality to the software for whoever wants to download and install them. Dreamweaver is supported by a large community of extension developers who make extensions available (both commercial and free) for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

Like other HTML editors, Dreamweaver edits files locally, then uploads all edited files to the remote web server using [], SFTP, or WebDAV.

Syntax highlighting

As of version 6, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages out of the box:

ActionScript
Active Server Pages (ASP)
ASP.NET
C#
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
ColdFusion
EDML
Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
Java
JavaScript
JavaServer Pages (JSP)
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
Visual Basic (VB)
Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)
Wireless Markup Language (WML)

It is also possible to add your own language syntax highlighting to its repertoire.

In addition, code completion is available for many of these languages.

Version history

Color	Meaning
Red	Old release; not supported
Yellow	Old release; still supported
Green	Current release
Blue	Future release

Provider	Major Version	Minor/Alternate Name	Release date	Notes
Macromedia	1.0	1.0	December 1997	Initial release
	1.0	1.2	March 1998
	2.0	2.0	December 1998
	3.0	3.0	December 1999
	3.0	UltraDev 1.0	June 1999
	4.0	4.0	December 2000
	4.0	UltraDev 4.0	December 2000
	6.0	MX	May 29, 2002
	7.0	MX 2004	September 10, 2003
	8.0	8.0	September 13, 2005
Adobe	9.0	CS3	April 16, 2007	Replaced Adobe GoLive in the Creative Suite series
Adobe	10.0	CS4	September 23, 2008

Internationalisation and localisation

Language Availability

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 is available in the following languages: Arabic (Middle Eastern version), Persian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew (Middle Eastern version), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish,
Adobe Dreamweaver Middle Eastern language versions available from WinSoft.

Specific Features for Arabic and Hebrew languages

Dreamweaver Middle Eastern versions allow typing Arabic, Persian or Hebrew text (written from right to left) within the code view. Whether the text is fully Middle Eastern (written from right to left) or includes both English and Middle Eastern text (written left to right and right to left), it will be displayed properly in the browser.

The Middle Eastern versions are also available for Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe InCopy and for Adobe Creative Suite (Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium).