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By Lee Schlesinger
Network World, 3/30/98

With the proliferation of Web authoring products these days, any new tool needs something special to succeed.

Macromedia, Inc.'s Dreamweaver stands out for its graphical authoring tools, support for style sheets and animation, and transparent transport between its graphical page construction environment and command-based authoring. However, its high price and lack of an image editing tool, as well as a sparsity of page templates, make it most useful to designers who already have tools for creating graphics.

Starting to weave

Launching Dreamweaver brings up a main window for page content and three floating windows for tailoring that content. One of these floating windows is for formatting text, another is for inserting objects and the third is for opening still more windows for specialized tasks.

To create a new page, you type in the main window or download an existing page or site. A site window lets you store sets of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) connection information, then connect, get and put up files with the click of a button.

You can track users working on a site via a check-in/check-out feature. And, from the site window, you can preview a page in any browser.

Unfortunately, Macromedia provides no utility for importing common word processing files, such as those in Microsoft Word .doc format. But working with common HTML elements such as images, text and tables is a breeze. We really appreciated Macromedia's multiple levels of undo commands.

Dreamweaver lets you save snippets of HTML code into temporary repositories called libraries. Each site you work on can have a single library; it would be nice to have a global library, but the product has none. You can paste text from a library onto a page with a single click.

Form, table and frame editing is highly graphical but not as intuitive as with Microsoft Corp.'s FrontPage 98. For example, right-clicking on a table element brings up a context menu that lets you change properties of the cell, row or column. But right-clicking in a form does not. You have to make changes on a formatting toolbar in a floating window.

HTML heaven

Dreamweaver has the best tools for creating HTML 4.0 style sheets we've found in a full- featured Web authoring product. Unlike FrontPage 98, which makes you type in style sheet commands in a text window, Dreamweaver employs a graphical interface to let you create standard styles for typefaces, alignment, backgrounds, borders and other elements, and save them as style sheet files. You then can reference a style sheet file from any HTML page, and all your formatting is in place.

Many of the properties you can set from within style sheets also are available within HTML files. Dreamweaver's main window sports menus to modify the properties of elements and text, or you can change them using a toolbar in a floating window.

For the visually oriented, Dreamweaver can display vertical and horizontal rules and a grid, which lets you position items precisely by dragging them around on the page.

There's a complete complement of commands for creating tables and frames.

A few frame templates are included with the product, but finding them takes a bit of work because they're hidden under the Help menu.

If you feel the need to get away from the graphical tools, you can launch your favorite external editor. The product is bundled with Allaire Corp.'s HomeSite 3.0, one of our favorite command-based editors. Dreamweaver makes no changes to any HTML code it imports or exports - a feature Macromedia calls transparent HTML. With virtually every other commercial HTML editor, a look at the graphically created code turns up unwanted metatags or other items you never meant to put on a page.

Today's Web requires interesting content, and Dreamweaver can provide it. In addition to dynamic HTML, Dreamweaver can generate JavaScript animations that move content.

A layered approach

Animations depend on layers, which are containers for content that Dreamweaver can position on a page. To use them, you select the Layer command on the Insert menu, then drag an object from the page onto the layer. Next, you specify a starting and an ending point on a graphical time line. You can designate additional key frames on the time line to specify where the object should appear between the start and end time. This is useful when describing a curve.

You can have multiple layers on a time line, meaning you can create sophisticated animated graphics. Dreamweaver generates all the proper JavaScript code behind the scenes.

Once you're done with a site, publishing it is just as easy as downloading it. You can select all files that are newer than those on the target FTP directory with one menu choice and send them to the remote site with a single button click.

Other than that, there is no sophisticated site management, such as the ability to check for broken links. Dreamweaver also lacks a graphics construction tool kit, such as Microsoft's Image Composer, and a facility for easily inserting metatags such as description, keywords and robots.

Installing Dreamweaver is simple. Online help, in the form of HTML files, is excellent. Animation tutorials help you understand processes such as building time lines and layers.

Dreamweaver is stronger than FrontPage 98 for creating style sheets and is better at adding dynamic features. But it's a bit behind on table and frame creation and use of wizards. What's more, it doesn't have a graphics editor. At $299, Dreamweaver isn't as good a value as FrontPage, which costs less than half.