If you've never used Dreamweaver before, see Chapter 1 for a welcome and grand tour. If you're upgrading from Dreamweaver 4 or some other version, you'll find that Dreamweaver MX 2004 offers a host of new features aimed at both the novice Web designer and the seasoned HTML guru.
Dreamweaver MX 2004's most significant changes come to its Cascading Style Sheet tools. Dreamweaver does a much better job of displaying CSS designs, so you can create advanced layouts without constantly jumping to a Web browser to preview your page.
Creating and editing styles is easier, too. You can use the basic word processing controls of the Property inspector to format text and create new CSS styles at the same time.
The new CSS rule inspector lets you see which CSS rules affect the current selection. As a result, it's easier to figure out how formatting rules interact, and to understand why elements on a page look the way they do.
To make sure your pages work with a wide variety of Web browsers, the improved cross-browser validation feature can warn you if the HTML or CSS you've used in building a page won't work with a certain browser.
Bringing material in from Microsoft Word and Excel just got easier. You can copy and paste information from Word or Excel documents while preserving basic formatting like paragraphs, headlines, bold, italics, and bulleted lists. You can even use an advanced paste option to retain more detailed formatting options, like fonts and colors.
A new start page makes it easier to open recent documents, create new documents, and access help and tutorial files.
New PHP/MySQL commands let you add password-protection to your PHP/ MySQL Web sites.
Macromedia occasionally issues updates to Dreamweaver. To make sure you're using the latest version, visit the Macromedia Web site at www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/downloads_updaters.html .
