Macromedia
today announced Dreamweaver 2, a new release of its professional Web
authoring tool that adds new features for page
design and production, visual authoring for
dynamic publishing, site management, and Roundtrip XML.
The new version has some exciting new features:
Tracing: after a designer comes up with a rough image of what a page should
look like, Dreamweaver will display it as a scaled-back image in
background, so developers can more easily code the page to lay out like the design.
Layered Design: works with 3.0 browsers (using tables). You can specify the
exact precision of the WYSIWYG-to-code translation, as well as the table
size, so you’ll get clean code, rather than tables filled with 1-pixel images.
Import to Spec: change the source formatting of imported HTML documents to
match your “house style”
Live Media Playback and Server-Side Content Preview: directly from
Dreamweaver: you don’t have to keep flipping to your browser.
Visual Site Map: for site management.
Global Search and Replace: can change the word “burger”, for instance, only
if it’s within a table, or only change a color if it’s in a BODY BGCOLOR tag.
Automatic Link Management: now professional designers can deal with links
as easily as if they were using FrontPage
Dream Templates: design a page, save it as a template, and lock certain
sections, so that a coder can come along and use it as a template for a new
page without screwing something up.
Roundtrip XML: they’re ready for the next century! You can define your own
XML tags and objects and property inspectors (Dreamweaver will store them)
and nothing will be changed, whether going in or out of Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver 2 will be available in December 1998 simultaneously for Windows
95/98, Windows NT 4.0 or
later, and MacOS 7.5.5 or later. Macromedia will offer upgrades for
previous customers, and a specially-priced bundle that will include its
Fireworks product. Like the first version, it will include the
latest version of either BBEdit or HomeSite. For more information or to
download a free
30-day trial version, visit the Dreamweaver site.
