Design View in Dreamweaver - what css makes the problem

Any insight?

[nigassma]

Last month I started a thread that was quickly answered as to why Design View in Dreamweaver renders CSS so poorly. I was wondering if anyone knew what were some examples of why Dreamweaver breaks when in Design View. Is it the display: block? width: auto?

Here's the previous post.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[kiwibrit]

I've never figured it. For CSS I accept that Design View is a crude estimation of what may happen when viewed by a browser. One good reason for having a local test server - mines on the C drive of my PC (other good reasons, javascript, and server side stuff).
If you are using IE, also check in Firefox, at least, to see what is going on. There can be alarming differences.

[nigassma]

I'm not having browser rendering issues, it is purely Dreamweavers poor performance when it comes to rendering CSS properly. My menu for instance has some floated elements and looks jacked up, but if I remove the floats it looks better. But wait, when I view it in a web browser its all rubbish again. I'm not worried its just that the person working directly above me in the web department refuses to work in code view.

[kiwibrit]

I guess he/she will have to work in Design View and check output on a local testing server, then. I know of no way around that.

[nigassma]

Yah or we scrap our 4th menu system that works perfectly fine in any browser, but breaks horribly in Design View.

[bedlam]

One option may be to upgrade Dreamweaver; I know that DW MX2004 is substantially better at rendering at least some complex css pages than even DW MX. I was concerned recently that a non-maintenance client wouldn't be able to work on her new site since it rendered so horribly in DW MX, but it turned out that her (newer) version of DW rendered the pages almost correctly.

Of course you'd want to test this on a few different pages before upgrading a whole office's software...

-B

[nigassma]

Yep, that's why I've been using it ever since its release

It seems that when viewing the Macromedia site in Dreamweaver that it doesnt break even though it heavily relies on CSS.

I noticed that they link to a stylesheet that uses @import to call the rest of the stylesheets. I'm wondering if that's a solution or if it is the fact that their site pages are templates.

[kiwibrit]

I'm using MX2004. Some pages break up in Design View (even though they are fine in browsers) others do not. I've figured no logic to it.

[faltered]

Yup, just like everyone else here, I find DesignView to be just a crude estimation of how the page will work. Every time I make a major change, I preview in a few browsers to see how it'll look. I find that the easiest and best way to make sure everything looks the way I want it to.

[nigassma]

Yesterday I asked the guys at Macromedia what their stance was on the topic. Apparantly Design View doesn't work well with floats and when objects are positioned relatively. That's where most of the breaks come from. The best thing to do right now is to go from DW MX to DW MX2k4 because they said that they had fixed some flaws between releases. The forum moderator is also hoping that his info is correct. He has heard that rendering CSS correctly is their main goal with the release of the next ver.

[zackattack]

Good to know that (hopefully) Macromedia will be looking at this is the next version, thanks for letting us know...

I use DWMX 2004 and come across this allot of the time, can confirm it is nearly always when I start floating elements, the biggest pain is the editablility for other people who may make modifications to the site later on :-(

oh well, fingers crossed

ZA

[nigassma]

Yah that's why I like telling clients that for small modifications later on I wouldn't charge them my normal rate but rather something like $40. That way they don't have to deal with the craziness of their CSS fluid site in Design View.

And now that Adobe has their hands in Macromedia, who knows what will happen with Dreamweaver.

[cuce]

Here's some of things I've observed that don't render properly in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

*{margin:0;} < doesn't show up at all.

top and bottom margins on <p>,<hx>,<li>,<br/> and others display the same no matter how they are set.

<hr/>(<hr>) always displays as default no matter how you style it.

certain complex floats display wrong.
Absolute and Relative Position display wrong.

the only thing i really noticed that they changed from old MX rendering is that display:block/inline shows up now(im sure there were more but thats all i noticed).

[sushealy]

Having the same problem, and finding no help or solutions on the Macromedia DW forum, I reported it as a bug-report to Macromedia. A nice tech emailed back and said the Design-time style sheets in DWMX04 'should correct' this problem.

But ... finding documention on how to actually use design-time is something else again :[

I've just posted a message on the WYSIWYG and Text code editors forum with regard to this, hoping to find someone to suggest some articles, documentation on use, etc of DTSS and Dreamweaver. I did find some articles re: DW MX (which really doesn't support CSS well at all).

For now I live with the 'scramble' as it doesn't happen on all the pages, and I work with a split-view anyway, using the design-view to more or less check to see what's happening visually in the design.

'Course - previewing in a browser helps too. And then again, I work on a Mac, which opens the can of worms of what pages looks like on a PC :[ --- so far, IE6 PC gives me the most headaches, the same as everyone else. -- Susan