What's new in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

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Donald Booth of the Dreamweaver quality engineering team talks about his favorite features in Dreamweaver CS3: Spry integration, CSS Advisor, standards-based rendering, and Photoshop integration. (3:40)

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What's new in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3

Donald Booth (April 6, 2007)

My name is Donald Booth and I work on the Dreamweaver quality engineering team.

Some of my favorite features in Dreamweaver CS3 are Spry integration, CSS Advisor, standards-based rendering—that's going to be a great feature—and also Photoshop integration.

I think this release will definitely help people build Ajax applications, Spry applications specifically. We really make it pretty easy. The idea that you can literally go to the Insert bar, click on Accordion, and you have a working Accordion on your page. It's really that easy.

We have the three flavors of Spry, which are Spry effects for fading and growing elements. There's widgets, which are pre-canned pieces of code. The widgets are integrated into Dreamweaver in a really nice way. We did a lot of work on the back end to make sure we could render widgets properly on the design surface. So when you put an Accordion into Dreamweaver, it looks like an accordion. And you can click on a tab it will open and close, and you can edit the content—you can change everything.

CSS Advisor is great. It's a way to help identify common CSS issues that developers run into every day. Probably the biggest pain point is CSS debugging, so we came up with the idea of CSS Advisor. The basic principle is that we would look for common CSS bugs or hacks—those sorts of things—recognize them in the code, alert the user to their existence, and then also link to a website where we can have an explanation of what the bug is, what it is called, and why it is happening. And then show code samples of why it is broken and how to fix it. Right in the Dreamweaver design surface, you can identify your errors, go find the solutions, and off you go.

We've made a big change in the way we render things. In previous versions, we would render to IE6 because it kind of made sense to render to that because that is what people were using. As we've become more sophisticated in the web world, the standards movement is really grabbing hold and becoming more important to more developers. We decided to change our rendering engine to do standards-based rendering where we're not tied to a specific browser but we go to the letter of the standard.

The next great feature in Dreamweaver CS3 is Photoshop integration. You can now copy from Photoshop, make a selection or a layer, whatever you have in the Clipboard, and paste it into Dreamweaver. It'll prompt you for a Save File dialog, an image optimization dialog, and then it will drop it right on your page, make the correct paths, and also maintain that link to the original PSD.

I think the people who are going to benefit most from Dreamweaver CS3 are probably the web developers who use Dreamweaver day in and day out. It will also help people who spend a lot of time doing CSS. With CSS Advisor, it will help them troubleshoot their pages quicker. The standards-based rendering will let them know that they are doing their coding correctly and the Dreamweaver Design view will reflect what they see with the standards-based browsers.

Things like Spry will allow them to make Web 2.0 pages, make cutting-edge items on their page, let them use widgets very simply, so they can develop Spry pages quicker and easier, and understand the Ajax world using Spry.

The end users will benefit because their browsing experience will be better. And we all win.

Автор: Donald Booth, Adobe.

Написано Апрель 6, 2007

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