Dreamweaver 8 new features preemptive preview

Dreamweaver

As part of the Macromedia Studio 8 Web Development Suite just released, Dreamweaver 8 adds a number of exciting new features. As the industry's leading web production software, Dreamweaver 8 this time, in addition to adding a lot of sophisticated improvements, more advanced workflow, in the new features also added to the redesigned CSS tools, faster background FTP, and tools for converting XML files to documents that are designed to be perfect and more user-friendly to support browsers.

Here are some of the more important new features in Dreamweaver 8 to see if they are attractive enough to entice you to upgrade to the newer version.

I. Improved workflow

Dreavweaver 8 introduces a number of ingenious improvements that can help web designers work more efficiently. The tabbed interface of the document window places all open documents in a single panel, just as we often use the tabbed browser Maxthon, when we switch documents with just one click of the left mouse button, so that we no longer need to take time to find open windows.

In addition, users can now save the layout of the panels as "Workspace layout" (workspace layouts). In this way, users can save panel combinations to accommodate different workflow processes. For example, a user can create a workspace layout for a data-driven Web page design, and then create a work layout for designing a page with more CSS components, which can be toggled back and forth between the two layouts when designing the two different pages.

Several new features are appealing to designers: zooming in can help you align images more easily, select smaller objects, and view smaller text; You can position objects more precisely by dragging and dropping them on the page Let Dreavwerver display a guide line to show the viewable area at different resolutions.

The support for Flash video allows users to embed video directly in a Web page using a type of VCR-controlled method. The creation and encoding of this video requires additional programs, such as Flash MX 2004.

Second, the extended CSS support

CSS features are already very powerful in Dreamweaver MX 2004. On this basis, Dreamweaver 8 provides stronger support for CSS. Dreamweaver 8 enhances the display of complex stylesheet information, reducing the number of times that you have to jump to a Web browser to check code design.

Several visualization settings provide a very helpful way of viewing, which resolves the challenge of viewing a complex CSS layout. Users can outline CSS block-elements, or highlight them with different background colors, so they can quickly identify their location and size. Dreamweaver 8 also provides useful hints for visually displaying the effects of padding and margins in an element.

The new media format supports using a user to add a style to a specific device, for example, you can add a style sheet that is used only for page printing, or you can add a style sheet that is only displayed on a computer screen.

The CSS panel is now completely redesigned into a unified panel, bringing together a number of Dreamweaver MX 2004 CSS panels in one place. The CSS panel becomes a more available control panel, using CSS panels to quickly confirm styles, edit styles, and view styles applied to page elements (like viewing paragraphs, images, and links).

Dreamweaver 8 Adds a summary view to the CSS panel to quickly confirm the CSS properties that apply to the currently selected element. A simple list makes it easy to see which of the attributes in which style is applied to the currently selected element. The rules for controlling the combination of multiple CSS styles to format a Web page are complex and confusing, so this feature will quickly become an indispensable tool for web designers, freeing designers from complex designs based on CSS.

third, fast file transfer

In the past, when transferring files to a Web server, many web designers had to sit around and wait for the long transfer process. The new version finally introduced the background FTP function. Dreamweaver's previous version, when transmitting files over the Internet, made it more likely that users would not be able to use Dreamweaver to do other work. Now we can continue to work in one site, edit and add new pages, create new styles, and so on, because Dreamweaver now honestly transmits files in the background.

In addition, Dreamweaver 8 provides a powerful file synchronization feature that allows users to ensure that the content of the site is always up to date.

Iv. Vision support for the XML/XSLT

Dreamweaver 8 inherits the consistent tradition of Macromedia and continues to provide user-friendly, visual tools to handle complex technologies. The new XML/XSLT authoring feature simplifies the process of formatting XML files for Web browsing. Users can create XSLT files and use CSS formats entirely, converting them into XML files that are difficult to understand, and putting them into compelling web pages.

Dreamweaver 8 provides two ways to solve this problem: the client-side approach allows users to quickly format an XML file for browsers such as Safari, Firefox, IE 6 (Windows) ( or any other browser that can read and display XML and XSLT files. If you want to get more audiences, you can use the dynamic page tool of Dreamweaver 8 to translate XML files into HTML files that are supported by any Web browser, using the power of PHP, ASP, or other Dreamweaver understandable server-side languages.

Now many of the Internet users use RSS to get the latest information, RSS feed is actually simple XML, using the Dreamweaver 8 can be a favorite site to create the latest information into the RSS feed into your home page.

In addition to the new features mentioned above, Dreamweaver 8 offers a few other minor improvements that are not listed here, so let's get to know each other in the trial process.

Last word: What's missing from Dreamweaver 8?

Although Dreamweaver 8 provides the new features described above, it can attract users to upgrade to the new version, but also a great help to users, but some aspects of the problem is still not resolved. Dreamweaver behavior, that is, to add interactive JavaScript applet to a Web page, is almost entirely discarded, and the server side does not provide any exciting new behavior for adding more data-driven Web site features.