Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 is the industry-leading web development tool,
enabling users to efficiently design, develop and maintain standards
-based websites and web applications. With Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, web
developers go from start to finish, creating and maintaining basic
websites to advanced applications that support best practices and the
latest technologies. Dreamweaver supports and guides users as their
skills grow and web technologies evolve, facilitating easy and quick
adoption of new technologies and methodologies.
With Dreamweaver 8, Macromedia continues to push the envelope of Web
development. In addition to many subtle refinements and workflow
improvements, the leading visual Web-page authoring program boasts
redesigned CSS tools, snappier background FTP, and tools for converting
XML files into beautifully designed, browser friendly documents.



Features:
- Developers can use it with the server technology of their choice to build powerful Internet applications
- Includes leading expanded CSS support for CSS-based design to
hand-coding features (Create sophisticated, standards-based sites with
Cascading Style Sheets)
- Cross-Browser Validation: Automatically check tags and CSS rules for compatibility across leading browsers
- Improved Workflow
- The professional choice for building web sites and applications
- A powerful combination of visual layout tools, application development features, and code editing support
- Developers and designers can create appealing, standards-based sites and applications quickly
- Secure FTP: Fully encrypt file transfers and prevent unauthorized access to data and files

Macromedia Dreamweaver is an HTML editor developed by Macromedia. It was
originally targeted at professional web designers and offers an editing
system that combines both the productivity of WYSIWYG design with the
control of HTML code editing mode. This combination was quite unique in
late 1990s and helped Dreamweaver to a widespread adoption. It is
currently available for Mac and Windows and holds about 80% of the
professional HTML editor market. Dreamweaver is the editor of choice for
creating and editing web templates. The latest version is Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX 2004. In addition to native support for Mac OS x and
Windows, Dreamweaver also can run on Unix-like platforms through the use
of emulation software such as an incarnation of Wine.

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, which
can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true
because the application makes it very easy to create table-based
layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized
Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply
with W3C standards.

Dreamweaver allows you to pick most browsers installed on your computer
to preview websites. It also has some nice site management tools for the
novice, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code
by whatever parameters you specify, up to the entire site. The behaviors
panel also allows creation of basic JavaScript without any coding
knowledge.