What s New in Dreamweaver 8

What's New in Dreamweaver 8

If you've used Dreamweaver before, you'll notice that while some things look very similar, some things also look very different. A comprehensive description of all the new features in Dreamweaver 8 would take up an entire chapter or possibly an entire book, so here are just a few of the highlights:

• Background file transfer: Tired of twiddling your thumbs while Dreamweaver is uploading files? Now you can keep working while files transfer in the background. See Chapter 2 for more details.

• Zoom: You can now zoom in on a page to inspect images or work with a complex table layout, or zoom out to preview how a page looks. There's more about the Zoom tool in Chapter 6.

• Guides: If you're used to guides in other graphical applications, you'll be thrilled that they're now in Dreamweaver. They're great for making sure that images and divs are placed exactly where you want them to be. Chapter 6 gives the details about laying out your pages.

• Workspace layouts: As mentioned earlier in this chapter, you can use one of the included default layouts, or customize and save your own.

• Tabbed documents for Mac: Mac users are no longer second-class citizens having to do without tabs. With Dreamweaver 8, tabbed document windows make it simple to move between open documents.

• Compare files: You can now use your own preferred file comparison tool when you want to compare files to find out what's changed. You can compare two local files, a local file to a remote file, or two remote files.

• Paste Special: Dreamweaver has new pasting options: you can retain any Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel source formatting or just paste the text. Chapters 4 and 14 cover making Dreamweaver work with other applications.

• A new approach to CSS: There are a multitude of new CSS- related enhancements in Dreamweaver 8, from the new CSS panel to CSS rendering improvements. These will all be covered in detail in Chapter 5.

• The Style Rendering toolbar: Mentioned briefly above, you can use the Style Rendering toolbar to view content based on CSS media types.

• And many, many more ...