The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this
web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local international currency,
e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees…
CurrCon requires an up-to-date browser
and Java version 1.8, preferably 1.8.0_131.
If you can’t see the prices in your local currency,
Troubleshoot. Use Firefox for best results.
DreamWeaver CS6 is Adobe’s
(neé Macromedia’s)
Last revised/verified:2012-04-22
DreamWeaver is the tool most professional webdesigners use for editing
HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language v 5),
especially
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
with embedded
JSP (Java Server Pages),
PHP (Pre-Hypertext Processor),
ASP (Active Server Page),
JavaScript or Cold Fusion. It lets you see the
HTML
tags (in the Code Inspector) and the
rendered
HTML
side by side. You can edit either one and see the changes reflected
in the other view.
I don’t know if you can still buy it. They are promoting
renting it for
per month, which has the
advantage of lower entry cost, you can leave at any time if you are
unsatisfied or if you stop using it and you automatically get all
updates and you have more clout to get them to fix things. I applaud
this development. It will open up DreamWeaver to a much wider user
base. They are also pushing a cloud edition. I have not tried it, but
this strikes me as as idiotic idea. DreamWeaver is slow enough without
adding the overhead of a cloud. The rented edition is cheaper than the
cloud edition. The cloud edition might appeal to someone using a very
old computer.
Though they bill you monthly, you are locked in to pay for a year,
with some exceptions.
No PayPal.
You must pay by credit card. I, for one, refuse to use them.
This is still better than buying a product with no guarantee it will
work with Microsoft’s next
OS (Operating System)
or your next generation of hardware.
Rendering
The rendering is crude, nothing like a real browser. Applets and frames
just show as blank windows, but images show as the actual image. It does
not understand styles on <li. Bullet
icons do not show up at all. It shows underlined links, but you
can’t click them. It inserts white space that will not appear in a
browser rendering. Surely somebody can find a way to write a browser
plug-in that lets you click on a spot in the rendering and it moves the
cursor into the right place in a text editor. That would give you 90% of the value of Dreamweaver without the
expense.
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
You can for example apply a class to a span of text by highlighting it
and right clicking and
selecting from on of the predefined styles. The style names show up in
the fonts and colours they will render as making selection much more
accurate. You can buy it direct from the manufacturer for
. Adobe offers a 30 day free trial to
check out if This is suitable for you.
It has a combination of features that make it suitable for both
technical and artistic people. You need both to design a good website.
There are many features for embedding Ajax,
JSP
and other programatic tags. I don’t know what might be done to
make it support html
static macros. It has buttons for composing forms. A large
percentage of the support is for Spry, Adobe’s Ajax package.
Advantages
The most important feaure is the way you can click on an element
in the design view and then click on the code window and it takes
you directly to the corresponding code. This is extremely useful in
long, complex or repetitive documents.
You can highlight a column in a table and apply a style to every
element. Given that
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
specifies that colgroup must
idiotically refuse to apply styles to elements in a column, this
feature is extremely useful.
It can convent documents between various DOCTYPES.
It has a very picky syntax validator.
It can clean up Word 2000+ junk
HTML.
Spell-checking shows you the word in context with entities
rendered. It is so much easier that spell checking the code.
Unfortunately the spell check has no undo. Once you add a word to
the dictionary, it is in there. The spell check usually shows you
the questionable word in context, a useful feature, but 10%
of the time it is scrolled off screen.
It can updates links when you move files.
Disadvantages
Applying styles is a joke. You have to select
from the huge list of possible styles scrolling one style at a time
till you get to the one you want. It is much faster to just type
them out in full. Even in
DOS (Disk Operating System)
days there were keystroke and mouse techniques to accelerate such
selections. Dreamweaver does not even put the most recently used
styles at the top. At least up and down arrow work. Applying styles
is the bread and butter of an
HTML
editor. I give Dreamweaver an F- for this pathetic excuse for a user
interface. I find it hard to believe a company like Adobe would have
something so Mickey Mouse at the heart of such a mature product.
It is ponderous to start up. You pretty well have to leave it
running all the time.
The rendering is quite crude compared with what a browser does.
You can always preview in a real browser by hitting the F12
key or hitting Alt-F11 for live
view, but then you can’t use that view to navigate to
a spot in the code view.
As you type it constantly makes suggestions about what it thinks
you will type next. It lets you select from possibilities. These
don’t slow you down when you don’t use them and save
keystrokes when you do.
You can view the document four different ways, code, editable,
live and design. You can split the screen to see two views at once.
The editable rendering is very approximate, but the live view is
just like a real browser.
Help is slow, required Internet-access and is all but useless. It
might as well just be a Google in a browser.
It does not keep tags in lower case, even when I configure it to.
The commands ⇒ apply source formatting
indents. It will also reflow if you configure wrap on. It does not
insert-remove blank like like MicroEdge Visual Slick edit beautify.
It does not remove nugatory space. It does not tidy the case of
tags. And to top it off, it loses your place when you reformat. My Compactor
program removes excess blanks and fixes the case of tags, so those
DreamWeaver failings are not as important to me.
It does not highlight entities to let you know they are
well-formed.
It has extremely primitive and clumsy support for entities. It
tends to use hex rather than named entities and it supports only a
handful. Further, it meddles with existing documents converting
named entities to hex.
You have almost no ability to figure the formatting or the degree
of pickiness of the syntax validation.
It has so many advanced features that will just get in the way for
most users. It should come configured for beginner, intermediate or
advanced and let you tune from there to hide the features you
don’t need.
You need to be able to add your own macros with icons for them to
handle common tasks, like MicroEdge Visual SlickEdit.
Even when you tell it to use lower case tags, it keeps generating
them with random case. You have to manually find and correct them.
You can’t click links to view other documents, even in the
live view.
It is very slow dealing with large documents, particulary running
the source code tidy.
Books
Book referral for Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual: Covers 2014 release (Missing Manuals)
Teaches the desktop edition of Dreamweaver. There is also a cloud version of this book. It is organised as 16 self-paced lessons covering style sheets, dynamic HTML, multimedia and databases.
Online bookstores carrying Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 Digital Classroom
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