Adobe Dreamweaver

Macromedia Dreamweaver is a web design software application developed by Macromedia. It uses a powerful editing system that incorporates both WYSIWYG and HTML editing. It is currently available for Mac and Windows. The latest version is Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Rumors persist that Macromedia has built a version of Dreamweaver that runs on the Linux platform (using WINE), although the company has made no formal announcement on the matter.

As a part WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages' HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-experts to easily create web pages and sites. Some web developers criticize this approach as producing HTML pages that are much larger than they should be and cause Web browsers to perform poorly. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards. However, in recent versions of Dreamweaver, it has been at the front edge of HTML formats, including the powerful XHTML format.

Dreamweaver allows you to pick most browsers installed on your computer to preview websites.

Versions

• Dreamweaver 1.0 (Released December 1997; Dreamweaver 1.2 followed in March 1998)
• Dreamweaver 2.0 (Released December 1998)
• Dreamweaver 3.0 (Released December 1999)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 1.0 (Released December 1999)
• Dreamweaver 4.0 (Released December 2000)
• Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 (Released December 2000)
• Dreamweaver MX (Released May 2002)
• Dreamweaver MX 2004 (Released September 2003)

Competitors

• Microsoft FrontPage, Dreamweaver's primary competitor on the Windows platform.
• Adobe GoLive, available for Mac and Windows.