Macromedia Dreamweaver is a HTML editor developed by Macromedia. It was originally targeted at professional web designers and offers an editing system that combines both the productivity of WYSIWYG design uwith the control of HTML code editing mode. This combination was quite unique in late 1990s and helped Dreamweaver to a widespread adoption. It is currently available for Mac and Windows and holds about 80% of the HTML editor market. The latest version is Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Rumors persist that Macromedia has built a version of Dreamweaver that runs on the Linux platform (using Wine), although the company might have reevaluated the market opportunity and has made no formal announcement on the matter.

As a part WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-experts to easily create web pages and sites. Some web developers criticize this approach as producing HTML pages that are much larger than they should 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 criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards. However, in recent versions of Dreamweaver, it has been at the front edge of HTML formats, including the XHTML format.

Dreamweaver allows you to pick most browsers installed on your computer to preview websites. It also has some nice site management tools for the novice, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters you specify, up to the entire site. The behaviors panel also allows creation of basic javascript without any coding knowledge.

Versions

• Dreamweaver 1.0 (Released December 1997; Dreamweaver 1.2 followed in March 1998)
• Dreamweaver 2.0 (Released December 1998)
• Dreamweaver 3.0 (Released December 1999)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 (Released December 1999)
• Dreamweaver 4.0 (Released December 2000)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 (Released December 2000)
• Dreamweaver MX (Released May 2002)
• Dreamweaver MX 2004 (Released September 2003)

See also

• List of HTML editors
• Comparison of HTML editors

External links

• Official Site of Dreamweaver
• Dreamweaver Code Cleaner
• Macromedia Dreamweaver Extensions