Introduction

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 is a professional HTML editor for designing, coding, and developing websites, web pages, and web applications. Whether you enjoy the control of hand-coding HTML or prefer to work in a visual editing environment, Dreamweaver provides you with helpful tools to enhance your web creation experience.

The visual editing features in Dreamweaver let you quickly create pages without writing a line of code. You can view all your site elements or assets and drag them from an easy-to-use panel directly into a document. You can streamline your development workflow by creating and editing images in Macromedia Fireworks or another graphics application, then importing them directly into Dreamweaver, or by adding Macromedia Flash objects.

Dreamweaver also provides a full-featured coding environment that includes code-editing tools (such as code coloring and tag completion) and language reference material on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), among others. Macromedia Roundtrip HTML technology imports your hand-coded HTML documents without reformatting the code; you can then reformat code with your preferred formatting style.

Dreamweaver also enables you to build dynamic database-backed web applications using server technologies such as CFML, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and PHP.

Dreamweaver is fully customizable. You can create your own objects and commands, modify keyboard shortcuts, and even write JavaScript code to extend Dreamweaver capabilities with new behaviors, Property inspectors, and site reports.

This chapter contains the following sections:

What’s new in Dreamweaver 8

Where to start

Dreamweaver workflow for creating websites

Using Dreamweaver with other applications

Dreamweaver and accessibility

Guide to Dreamweaver instructional media

Typographical conventions

HTML and web technologies resources