Dreamweaver Introduction to web design

Macromedia's Dreamweaver is a professional hypertext markup language (HTML) editor for visually designing and managing websites and pages. A visual web editor is a tool that enables the devloper to create and edit Web pages while being able to see what they will look like as they are created. Dreamweaver is a product of Macromedia, whic has a tradition of creating software tools to help developers create media rich content for their Web pages. Macromedia offers other products such as as Flash, Authorware, and Fireworks. All of these products are geared toward high-end, professional Web page design.

Dreamweaver was introduced in 1997 and is currently available as version 4.0.
Dreamweaver 4.0 was created to meet the needs of variety of types of users, and has powerful capabilities foe professional web page design and developement. It includes features such as :

• Support for  cascading style sheets (CSS).
• Support for JavaScript and JavaScript debugger.
• Support for XML and other advanced HTML tools.

From its release as version 1.0, Dreamweaver's major feature was the use of  roundtrip HTML editing, which lets you create Web pages using either visual HTML editing tools or through straight text files with no difference in the resulting output. Dreamweaver is one of the few visual editors with graphical tools that do not produce proprieatry HTML code; hence, editing the HTML source is much easier. Dreamweaver automatically updates code that it recognizes as invalid (such as extra closing tags) when you switch back to it from another editor, but it leaves valid code in place.

Because of this, Dreamweaver is one of the more popular editors for the professional Web page designer. The difference between other popular HTML editors and Dreamweaver is its emphasis on professional. Professional designers enjoy being able to write their own code. Many HTML editors allow developers to write their own code, but other editors add a tremendous amount of  "overhead code." The roundtrip HTML editing technology in Dreamweaver also cleans up and reformats HTML when you want it to.

Dreamweaver has two different product versions available: Dreamweaver 4.0 and Dreamweaver Ultradev. Dreamweaver 4.0 is the core version of the HTML visual editor. Dreamweaver Ultradev is a combination of  Dreamweaver 4.0 and a suite of tools to make managing and developing ASP,JSP, or ColdFusion applications easier within the Dreamweaver environmant. This gives the website development team an integrated approach to developing database-driven applications. Database applications make up the conerstone of modern e-commerce applications.

Dreamweaver offers the student of Web page design a look into how Web pages are actually developed and managed in the professionals, each of whom has different functions and responsibilities. However, they all need acces to the same source code for modification and maintenance of web pages. Dreamweaver provides the tools and fucntionally to manage a website in a distributed environment. This the primary reason that Dreamweaver is the tools of choice for professional website developers and administrators.