Dreamweaver MX

Another exciting product announcement at the Apple Developer’s Conference is Dreamweaver MX, from Macromedia. In fact, you can download an OS X or Windows version right now. It has a lot of new functionality, including better support for PHP/MySQL. Future testing will determine whether that support includes design-time data.

CSS, XHTML, XML and any other buzzword you can think of are all supported. Most of the automated design tools can be run in a standards-compliant mode, so it doesn’t stick those <font> tags into your pages anymore. In fact, the entire tag database is now available for browsing and editing by the programmer. The full tag tree for any HTML, XHTML or XML document is also always available from a panel. As a bonus, they even included HTML 4.0 and XHTML validation. On the data side, many features of HomeSite and Ultradev have been folded into the product (Ultradev is in fact being retired), so Dreamweaver MX has live data in design mode.

This upgrade is long overdue, as many of Dreamweaver’s editing abilities are a little long in the tooth. The new renderer seems to handle many more CSS properties than 4.x, but doesn’t fix as many shortcomings as I would have liked; border style on images is still ignored and table sizing is sporadic for hand-coded pages. The preview release only crashed once. (It choked on an HTML ASCII file.) If you use Dreamweaver 4.x now, you should definitely check it out; it’s an enormous upgrade.