Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 is a professional HTML editor for designing, coding, and developing websites, web pages, and web applications. Whether you enjoy the control of hand-coding HTML or prefer to work in a visual editing environment, Dreamweaver provides you with helpful tools to enhance your web creation experience.

The visual editing features in Dreamweaver let you quickly create pages without writing a line of code. You can view all your site elements or assets and drag them from an easy-to-use panel directly into a document. You can streamline your development workflow by creating and editing images in Macromedia Fireworks or another graphics application, then importing them directly into Dreamweaver, or by adding Macromedia Flash objects.

Dreamweaver also provides a full-featured coding environment that includes code-editing tools (such as code coloring and tag completion) and language reference material on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), among others. Macromedia Roundtrip HTML technology imports your hand-coded HTML documents without reformatting the code; you can then reformat code with your preferred formatting style.

Dreamweaver also enables you to build dynamic database-backed web applications using server technologies such as CFML, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and PHP.

Dreamweaver is fully customizable. You can create your own objects and commands, modify keyboard shortcuts, and even write JavaScript code to extend Dreamweaver capabilities with new behaviors, Property inspectors, and site reports.

This chapter contains the following sections:

Keep working while Dreamweaver 8 uploads files to the server. For more information, see Managing file transfers.

Zoom
Get greater control over your design with zoom. Zoom in and inspect an image or work with a complex nested table layout. Zoom out to preview how a page will look. For more information, see Zooming in and out.

Guides
Compare the page layout to page mockups with pixel-perfect accuracy using guides to measure page layouts. Visual feedback helps measure distances accurately and supports intelligent snapping. For more information, see Using guides.

Paste Special
With the new pasting options in Dreamweaver, you can retain all the source formatting created in Microsoft Word, or just paste the text. For more information, see Adding text to a document.

Site-relative references
Work seamlessly with server-side includes at design time and runtime by ensuring that references are relative to sites instead of local files. For more information, see Setting the relative path of new links.

Code-editing improvements
Gain greater control over how Dreamweaver provides code hints and completes tags to fit with your coding style. For more information, see Setting the code hints preference options.