Dreamweaver all geared up for CSS

say goodbye to font tags at last

[Purple Martin]

I attended the MX Studio 2004 world-wide launch yesterday, and I have to say that the new CSS support in Dreamweaver is impressive.

Just as the first MX brought HomeSite-like code editing into the Dreamweaver window, so MX 2004 brings TopStyle-like CSS editing into the Dreamweaver window.

Each time you change the colour or size of some text a new style is created so that you can reuse it over and over - Dreamweaver no longer spews font tags all over your code.

You can detach and attach stylesheets on the fly, making it very quick to switch between layouts and styles for a site.

One feature I liked was the inheritance highlighting: obviously CSS styles inherit, but what if a style is overridden by another lower element or class? It gets highlighted in red so you know it's being overridden lower down.

It also has - and this is cool - browser-compatibility checking. You specify a list a browsers to check against, and Dreamweaver will do a kind of validation on your page and tell you where your code has browser compatibility issues.

Now that the big WYSIWIG editors are getting right into CSS, we should start seeing more and more sites built with good CSS and better accessibility. Bring it on!

[skipfactor]

Thanks Purple Martin. Any leakage there on an exact availability date?

[Purple Martin]

Sorry, if they did mention it I missed it. The website allows you to register for notification when it becomes available, but I can't see a date there. My guess is that the date hasn't been set yet.

[Kratzy]

I've pre-ordered it, and in the confirmation message they said it would be available "mid-September".

[Nick_W]

Good news, thanks for posting it! ;)

Nick

[Bowdii]

That is fantastic! I heard that it was going to be great, but didn't hear about the css, or the browser checker!

Great post!

[dragonlady7]

I'm so glad I didn't go ahead and buy MX for my new computer yet...... I actually decided to give hand-coding a go because I couldn't master CSS in Dreamweaver and wanted to learn it, and thought hand-coding was the other way to go.

I may be reassessing that belief...

[limbo]

Like me Dragonlady - was thinking about the upgrade for some time and this seems the prompt I need. Relatively cheap upgrade from DW4 as well - nice :)

[aaronjf]

YEAH.. I was not expecting them to update DW this soon after MX. Figured they were going to concentrate on other projects for 6 more months to a year.

I saw the site earlier today and was really excited about the browser check and additional CSS support. But, is the browser check on the fly or is it a command like "Check Links Site Wide"?

[aaronjf]

They announced yesterday that it is now shipping!

[caine]

> I was not expecting them to update DW this soon after MX

I found MX too be problomatic.

I'm getting my copy of 2004 next month, as my spend budget is being swallowed up by the conference, and getting a new site listed in the right places.

[4eyes]

I am trying out the trial download - Some nice features for CSS, but I can't believe that there is still no adequate support for iframes.

Not that I am big fan of iframes - but I have a customer with a massive iframed site that I have to 'fix'.

Pah

Probably going to buy it anyway