Dreamweaver mx, 8, cs3

Benefits of upgrade?

[nickreynolds]

Just had to do a bit of a computer overhaul and decided to use the dreamweaver/flash/fireworks 30 day trials having used mx for two years.

I've had a ratch around the forum and I'm trying to work out if there are any real benefits for a fairly low level web designer like myself to upgrade. I do almost everything in design view (hangs head in shame) and use layout boxes a lot.

I see the layout boxes have changed to some div tag thing. So far this is not causing any problems but want to know if anyone is having problems.

My biggest bug is that dreamweaver mx in design view shows my sites pretty as they are displayed in Internet Explorer but Firefox looks terrible. I then have to do some juggling around to get some kind of compromise. Is dweaver 8 and cs3 the same? What I seem to be getting now is some sites displaying very differently in design view to what they did in mx.

So apart from any comments on the above and since I am unlikely to be using anything other than static sites for quite some time, should i upgrade or not? Finally, is there much difference between dweaver 8 and cs3? If I can get a cheaper copy of 8 would that be a fair compromise?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I cannot comment on CS3 but I did upgrade from MX to DW8 a while back. There are not that many advantages in the upgrade but the most important is DW8's much improved handling of CSS(stylesheets). This is what you are seeing with the div tags.

The new version more or less forces you to use CSS for formatting your page content thus helping to make your website more compliant. Having said that, you will still need to have some knowledge of CSS so it would be worthwhile spending some time on one of the many CSS tutorials that are available on line or even buying a book on this. You don't have to be an expert on this (I'm not) but if you have half an idea of what is going on behind the scenes it will make life a lot easier for you.

My biggest bug is that dreamweaver mx in design view shows my sites pretty as they are displayed in Internet Explorer but Firefox looks terrible.

I don't think there is any way round this and it is not really a DW MX problem. It is more down to the fact that Internet Explorer is more forgiving with regard to its interpretation of HTML. etc. This means that what looks OK in IE will not necessarily look OK in Firefox, Opera or Netscape.

You may want to consider setting DW to preview web sites in Firefox. That way you will see the problems as they develop rather than having to try to fix them when the site is complete.