Dreamweaver brings HTML to life. (Macromedia's WYSIWYG editor)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)

In the fast-moving world of the Web, today's top HTML editor can be tomorrow's roadkill. The latest contender for the crown is Macromedia's Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG editor due in December that creates animated, CD-ROM-style Web pages using a new version of HTML called Dynamic HTML.

Like CyberStudio and NetObjects Fusion, Dreamweaver ($299 through February 1998, $499 after) lets you design Web pages by dragging items on a page. But while those programs use complex HTML tables, Dreamweaver uses a new HTML fea- ture, absolute positioning, to place objects with pixel-level accuracy. It also supports cascading style sheets, which lets you apply styles to a Web page or an entire site via a floating Style palette.

There's even CD-ROM-style interactivity: Via the Timeline Inspector, you can make text and graphics slide across a page or appear and disappear when you click on a link.

Hands off the Code

Web authors will appreciate Dreamweaver's hands-off approach to HTML code--we found that unlike with most WYSIWYG editors, opening several complicated pages revealed only a few rewritten tags. The tags Dreamweaver changed contained errors, which Dreamweaver corrected. Another plus is Dreamweaver's tight integration with Bare Bones Software's excellent BBEdit text editor, which is bundled with it. A library stores commonly used fragments of HTML code such as headers and footers. When you change an element in the library, Dreamweaver can automatically make that change on every other page in your site.

There are drawbacks to being a Web pioneer, though: Dynamic HTML pages require Internet Explorer and Navigator versions 4.0; older browsers see only a mish- mash of text and graphics. In contrast, CyberStudio and Fusion's layout meth- ods are compatible with most Web browsers in use today. Plus, Dreamweaver's interface for creating and editing older, more-common HTML tags such as tables doesn't seem as strong as either CyberStudio's or PageMill's. And much of Dreamweaver's impact has to do with being the first WYSIWYG editor to support Dynamic HTML. But will it be king of the hill in a few months? As is always the case in Web time, that's anyone's guess.