HTML

After Adobe absorbed Macromedia, Dreamweaver remained the default tool for many small teams building corporate sites, portfolios, and internal portals. Dreamweaver CS4 adds better CSS tooling, Live View powered by WebKit, and closer ties to the Adobe stack — but the hard part is still the same: keeping sites maintainable after launch. What CS4 Improved Live View renders pages with a WebKit engine — closer to Safari and Chrome than the old Design view approximation Stronger CSS panel workflows for designers who do not want to hand-write every rule Better code hinting for PHP and JavaScript Integration hooks for Photoshop comps and Bridge asset management Spry framework widgets for menus and form validation — use sparingly Subversion integration for teams finally moving off shared folders Live View reduces “upload and pray” cycles. You still need to test in IE7 and Firefox 3 — WebKit is not the whole audience. ...

My first websites did not start in a text editor. They started with Microsoft FrontPage 2003, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, and a lot of trial and error in Internet Explorer 6. That was normal in the early 2000s: visual editors lowered the barrier, and the web was still small enough that a personal page or a company brochure site could ship in a weekend. By November 2004, the tools are better — but the habits matter more than the brand on the box. ...