Your first impression of Dreamweaver 4 will probably be that not much
has changed (on the surface at least). Yup, it's got that same "floating
panel" interface that we've all grown to know and love, and all your old
friends are there: the Object panel, the Properties panel, the Launcher
panel. In fact, Macromedia has taken the floating Object panel and
integrated it into its core suite of Web media development applications, so
if you work in Flash, Dreamweaver or Fireworks, you only need to
familiarize yourself with one common Object panel interface. Pretty nifty.
The Objects panel has all of the standard buttons found in older versions --
insert image, insert table, insert horizontal rule -- along with a handful
of new, fancy tools that you can use to insert Flash and Fireworks elements
into your page layout. These tools follow Macromedia's strategy of seamless
integration between their core apps, and they can make adding multimedia
elements to your pages a total breeze. (We'll go over these features in
depth when we look at the multimedia features of
Dreamweaver 4.)
The Object panel has two new buttons that help you design the basic
layout of your Web pages: Layout view and Draw Layout Cell. By choosing the
Layout view option, you can get a precise view of how your page will appear
when viewed in a browser. This is as close as Dreamweaver 4 comes to true
WYSIWYG capability, a vast improvement on Dreamweaver's previous table
handling capabilities. Much like in a desktop publishing application, you
can automatically set your page width and height to whatever static size
you'd like.
The Draw Layout Cell tool is basically just a super-charged table
creation tool.
Once you draw a rectangular box in Layout view, Dreamweaver creates a
table, displays a tracing box around the table and displays the pixel
width and layer information directly in the Layout window. This makes it
easy for you to watch the pixel dimensions while you resize the table, move
elements around inside the tables and merge cells to create nested tables.
The array of tools in the launcher panel also has a new addition,
something called the Asset panel. Clicking on the Assets icon in the
launcher opens the Assets panel. This panel gives you a complete menu of
the common media elements that you use across all of the pages on your
site. All of your images, colors, referenced URLs, scripts, Flash elements,
QuickTime movies and Fireworks graphics are sorted into separate
navigatable trees. Once you browse through your asset library, you can grab
an element, drag and drop it where you want it to appear on your page
layout, and Dreamweaver handles all of the linking and manages your code.
Speaking of code, let's take a look at the first area that
Macromedia has overhauled to bring us the newest Dreamweaver experience,
the HTML and Code View functions.