{"id":4927,"date":"2008-09-16T09:40:30","date_gmt":"2008-09-16T14:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/16\/the-unstoppable-rise-of-adobe-dreamweaver\/"},"modified":"2008-09-16T09:40:30","modified_gmt":"2008-09-16T14:40:30","slug":"the-unstoppable-rise-of-adobe-dreamweaver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/?p=4927","title":{"rendered":"The unstoppable rise of Adobe Dreamweaver"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Andrew Whiteman<\/div>\n

I work for a company that runs Dreamweaver training courses and we find that there is no longer a typical user of this great web development program. Dreamweaver users now seem to come from all different types of company and from all walks of life: private individuals, financial people, marketing people, people in the health service, academicians It seems everyone needs to learn the basics of web development nowadays.<\/p>\n

Our conclusion is that the vast majority of people learning Dreamweaver nowadays are not specialists in web development or web design. They are simply people who need to develop web content in some shape or form and who have chosen or been recommended Dreamweaver as the best tool for the job. Dreamweaver is perceived as the obvious choice for both casual and professional web developers.<\/p>\n

So how has Dreamweaver attained its enviable position as the industry standard web development software? And is this position deserved? The second question is easier to answer than the first, so let’s deal with that one first. The answer is “Yes”: Dreamweaver deserves its position because it is such an excellent piece of software and because it demystifies the whole business of web development and puts it within reach of so many people. As to how Dreamweaver got where it is, well it did so by evolving, responding to changes in the web arena and embracing new web technologies as they have come along.<\/p>\n

In the early days of web development, there were two types of web development tool: those used by coders (the specialists who understood the technologies underlying web pages) and the visual software tools which functioned in a manner similar to word processing and page layout programs and were used by non-specialists and inexperienced web developers. The visual programs (which included Dreamweaver) had a very poor reputation among web professionals who found that the code produced by these programs was clumsy, verbose and inefficient.<\/p>\n

With each release of Dreamweaver, Macromedia continued to add features which showed that they understood the need to create clean code even when using visual tools. They added features to the program for maintaining the integrity of code and removing redundant elements. They enhanced their coding environment with features like line numbering, code hints and the tag selector, a feature which displays the tag underlying the currently selected element and the hierarchy of tags in which the element is contained. They also added the ability to verify whether a web page contained code incompatible with certain browsers.<\/p>\n

Macromedia also added a number of features aimed at speeding up web development which they knew would be attractive to serious web developers. For one thing, they offered a series of features which would automatically generate server-side content and save developers a great deal of programming time. Initially, these features were only available in a special edition of Dreamweaver called “Dreamweaver UltraDev”. When these features became available in the standard edition of Dreamweaver, the program became much more attractive to the serious web developer.<\/p>\n

Macromedia further enhanced Dreamweaver’s reputation as a tool for serious web developers by added collaborative functionality to the program; features which acknowledged the fact that a lot of web developers are part of a team. Dreamweaver’s two main collaboration features are “File check in Check out” and “Design Notes”. The former allows developer A to open a file and check it out; so that developer B knows that the file is being worked on by A and doesn’t start making conflicting changes to the file. The design notes feature allows developer A to attach a note to a particular file which can then be picked up by developer B.<\/p>\n

The web is constantly evolving and new technologies are being developed to make web sites more appealing to visitors. The owners<\/a> of Dreamweaver have always been very good at embracing these new technologies sooner rather than later. An illustration of this can be seen in the latest version of Dreamweaver which includes a series of CSS layouts which can be used by newbie web developers to create pages which separate web content from information relating<\/a> to the styling of that content. Dreamweaver also has useful features for making it easy to make your content accessible to web surfers with disabilities.<\/p>\n

The latest Dreamweaver also includes some groovy new features which embrace the Ajax technology using the Adobe’s Spry Framework for Ajax, a library of automatically generated JavaScript code which allows the creation of interactive web page on which page content can be updated in response to user actions without the page having to be reloaded.<\/p>\n

So, in short, Dreamweaver has all bases covered. Design-oriented web developers can use the program as a visual tool that generates reliable code. Experienced developers and programmers can work in code view and preview their work as required. Thus, the program makes web development approachable for just about any experienced computer user without dumbing down. This makes it deservedly the automatic choice for anyone who intends to become a web developer and needs a reliable software tool.<\/p>\n

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About the Author:<\/div>\n
The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions<\/a>, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses<\/a> at their central London training centre.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I work for a company that runs Dreamweaver training courses and we find that there is no longer a typical user of this great web development program. Dreamweaver users now seem to come from all different types of company and from all walks of life: private individuals, financial people, marketing people, people in the health service, academicians It seems everyone needs to learn the basics of web development nowadays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-4927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4927\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}