With over 3.5 million users, Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 dominates the world of professional web authoring in much the same way that Adobe Photoshop dominates photo-editing. It has achieved this commanding position by combining a wysiwyg design environment with unbeatable hands-on coding power and by focusing throughout on workflow-based efficiency. It is these same three core areas - visual design, coding and productivity - that are targeted in this latest release. In terms of wysiwyg design power, Dreamweaver 8 now falls into line with GoLive by offering a zoom capability - ranging between 6% and 3600%! - and Fit All, Fit Width and Fit Selection commands. The importance of this is seriously overplayed as web design is always viewed at 100%, but it should help users working on high resolution screens and possibly when aligning objects. Much more practically useful for accurately positioning layouts is the new support for rulers and draggable guides complete with tooltips for providing feedback on position and distances between. You can control the display, locking and snap setting of guides and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 includes a limited selection of preset guides representing the safe visible area of browsers at various screen sizes. Other improvements to Dreamweaver's wysiwyg design power concentrate on enhanced support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the layout and formatting mark-up language designed to work alongside HTML. In particular the core Design View has been updated to fully support advanced CSS techniques such as overflow handling, form elements and pseudo-elements. And to make life a little easier when working with CSS-positioned layouts, new visual aides are available to highlight CSS outlines, boxes and backgrounds while new tooltips provide greater feedback. Most impressive is Dreamweaver 8's new support for CSS media types. Using the new Rendering Toolbar you can now swap between seeing how a page will look on screen, on a handheld, or in print.

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