Diving into Dreamweaver

Building dynamic Web pages with Macromedia's hot new app

By Bob Schmitt
October 24, 1997

The problem with HTML is that it has always been a stacked medium — everything flows to the upper left corner and spills down the page, much to the chagrin of designers. Previous efforts by so-called WYSIWYG editors fell short of our expectations — even if you could position graphics and elements in different places on the page, it still collapsed to the upper left when you viewed it in the browser. Of course with tables we could painstakingly construct elaborate cells to force things into the desired layout, but tables were never designed to have empty cells and the control offered is limiting at best.

Now Dynamic HTML offers the hope of layers and pixel-level postioning — something that previously was unheard of ... the long-sought Holy Grail. Of course, with layers and additions such as CSS and JavaScript to add functionality or animation, hand-coding a Web page with once simple HTML has become a lot more complex. Not only is the coding more complicated, but with the visual positioning that layers offer, it is becoming more, well, visual. It only makes sense, then, that Web developers migrate toward tools that allow them to make visual placements of elements, such as text and graphics, while generating the necessary code behind the scenes.

Macromedia's Dreamweaver promises to be just such an app. And, while it may not be perfect, it will allow you to paint the broad stokes of your Web site quickly while giving you the code-level control you need to make necessary tweaks by hand. Hand-coding HTML served — and continues to serve — an active role in Web page creation, but just as the advent of desktop publishing made typesetters all but extinct, so too will WYSIWYG editors have a similar effect to those who only code HTML.