What's new in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Some upgrades are rip-offs, some are bug-ridden, some are too minor to worry about, but some are usually must-haves. Dreamweaver upgrades tend to fall into this last category.

Since Dreamweaver Is a web development tool, new features tend to reflect changes in the web technology, such as the growing importance of CSS. It's not usually just a case of introducing a few snazzy new tools for the sake of it.

Dreamweaver is now part of Adobe's Creative Suites, so part of the upgrade will simply be cosmetic, but what else have Adobe come up with in their first upgrade of this industry-standard web development tool.

This new version of Dreamweaver embraces the change that has taken place in the way web pages are supposed to be built. When the last version of Dreamweaver, version 8, was released, web designers were mainly using tables to lay out the content of their pages. Now, the recommend method is to use cascading style sheets (CSS). The new Dreamweaver contains a variety of CSS layouts which can be used for creating both pages and templates and which contain useful comments for designers on how the layouts work.

The new browser compatibility feature in Dreamweaver CS3 allows users to check for issues within their pages relating to specific browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Netscape). It creates a report explaining problems which may occur when CSS on your pages is rendered in a particular browser.

Dreamweaver has long had great features for integrating content with Fireworks. This new version extends a similar level of integration with the more widely-used Adobe Photoshop. Documents, slices or selections can be copied from Photoshop and pasted straight into Dreamweaver. An Image Preview window then appears in which compression and optimisation settings may be specified before the image is saved.

Dreamweaver now has support for Ajax, a programming model which uses various technologies, including JavaScript, to create fast, interactive web applications that respond to user actions by sending and receiving data to and from a server and refreshing elements of a web page without first having to reload that page. The Spry Framework, included in Dreamweaver CS3 is a collection of JavaScript code which offers developers a painless way of adding simple Ajax content to their pages.

Dreamweaver' Spry content is divided into three categories called widgets, special effects and data sets. The widgets offer several different interface elements such as tabbed panels which allow designers to display content in a given part of the page which changes when the user clicks a particular tab. Other widgets include form validation utilities which check data entered into elements on a form and menus and sub-menus for navigation.

Spry effects work on most HTML elements. In response to user actions, they will do things like fading, zooming or shrinking an element. The kind of stuff traditionally done using Flash.

Spry Data sets are JavaScript objects that display data from an XML source in an HTML table. There is also a useful drill-down capability whereby users can click on summary information displayed in rows of a table to display detailed information in another region of the page.

Dreamweaver CS3 is the first Dreamweaver version to run on Intel-based based Macs as well as PowerPCs. There are also versions for Window XP and Window Vista.

By: Andrew Whiteman

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes in London and throughout the UK.

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