Whilst my mother announced to me on the phone that she’d just gone and bought an MX-5, I had to content myself with the purchase of Dreamweaver MX – the successor to Dreamweaver 4, a product which I had used since its launch in late 2000, having grown-up with Dreamweaver – I remember using Dreamweaver 1.2 at the company I worked for in Brussels way way back… The entire MX range is effectively version six, with the Flash player being called Flash 6 player (it is a plug-in rather than a fully fledged software package).

I always view new versions of software with an air of suspicion, as I know that certain developers release new editions more often than others release bug fixes and patches (and the new versions are really little more than that in actual fact…). However that is not the case with Dreamweaver MX, which has a new look (something tells me that the on-going legal rumblings with Adobe might have necessitated that to a certain degree) and a lot of new features. Previously there had been Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver Ultradev, with the latter containing the functions that were used to create web applications, although it has now been including in Dreamweaver MX so effectively you get DW and DW Ultradev for your money, and there is an increasing likelihood that Homesite, another Macromedia product will also disappear from the Macromedia product palette. As a result Dreamweaver MX is the one for pro webdesigners – as it offers the full spectrum of web development possibilities, from hand-coding (yes, some developers still prefer to handcode!), through graphic design and various database connections.

Having completed the installation process, which was as ever a simple and straightforward process, I fired up DW MX for the first time, although it was not quite like the feeling of ripping open my Christmas presents, as I had downloaded the beta version from Macromedia’s site to have a little look at before this one popped through the letterbox. As I had previously mentioned, the product had a new look – with the traditional floating palettes, which did tend to clutter the screen up a lot and infuriated by the fact that they were not dockable with one another, having been replaced by the integrated palettes, with everything selectable from the right hand side and beneath the work area, where the properties palette is kept.

I had mentioned earlier that I wondered if HomeSite was going to be continued, and I suppose I ought to elucidate further as to what had caused me to doubt whether it would. In Dreamweaver MX’s coding view (now replete with line numbers – very useful if you use a browser to preview it and need to do a spot of debugging – unless like me your sites come out as they should first time out ;o) ) and the coder’s view is distinctly similar to that which users of homesite would remember (e.g. file explorer on the left-hand-side etc.). Other Homesite features to have been incorporated are snippets, colouring of syntax, code formatting and tag editing.

So what else is new???

Despite having said that Dreamweaver is good in that it doesn’t insert its own HTML like Frontpage does, that doesn’t mean that it is still compliant to W3C standards, and until now there has not been an in-built validator with Dreamweaver, although there is now. To use the validator, use the edit menu click on preferences and then click on validator and choose what you want to valid it with. Accordingly it is now possible to enforce ALT tags and document types appear in the header – an important part of compliance, although it is still possible to not stick pages through the validator.

For another use of the commands menus, I know that a lot of people also publish their Ciao and Dooyoo ops on their own sites – just in case both of Ciao and Dooyoo go tits up and so that people can still read their pearls of consumer wisdom. You could use the commands menu to tidy up the formatting (e.g. apply justification, change the font) and add a footnote e.g. "this op originally was written for uk.ciao.com or dooyoo.co.uk ..." (you get the idea!) with your little copyright message!

I paid €527.24 for my copy (German) from an online store here in Austria (approx £330) which was a tiny bit cheaper than the prices I have seen for the UK and including P&P. At the moment it is £351.02 from dabs.com, although if you want to go the whole MX hog – I will eventually I expect you can get it as part of the Studio MX Collection (Flash, Freehand, Fireworks and Dreamweaver MX versions) for £692.07 incl. VAT. Of course the other products in the range compliment Dreamweaver MX, and by having only purchased Dreamweaver MX to date I have not unlocked the full potential of MX – but hopefully will do soon, with Fireworks MX and Flash MX being part of an armoury for any webdesigner.