About Dreamweaver: Dreamweaver is an application of web development that was created originally by Macromedia and which now is being developed by the Adobe Systems. Dreamweaver integrates web development’s various aspects, including site management, web server tools and page creation with which a user can get a good perspective of the whole website. You can get Dreamweaver for both Windows Operation Systems and Mac. Recent versions of this application have also incorporated support for various web technologies like JavaScript, CSS and a number of frameworks and server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP and ColdFusion.

Features of Dreamweaver: Even though Dreamweaver is an application of web development and design which is code based and is a WYSIWYG hybrid, the WYSIWYG mode can hide the pages’ HTML codes from the users which help even the non coders to create sites and web pages. With the Dreamweaver application, it is quite easy to create table based layouts. The latest versions of the application have a focus on supporting the standard based layout, which can convert tables to layers.

The locally installed websites in the web browsers can be previewed by the users using Dreamweaver. Site management tools like FTP, SFTP and WebDAV features of synchronization and file transfers, templating features which help in the source update of shared code and layout of the whole sites without the server side includes and scripting, are present in this application. It also has the ability to use regular expressions and search items to find and replace code or text lines across the full site.

Dreamweaver can utilize the third party ‘extensions’ to enable and extend the main functionality of the application. For most of the tasks of web developments, like simple effects of rollover to fully featured shopping carts, Dreamweaver is supported by many extension developers, making the free and commercial extensions available. Dreamweaver can also edit the files locally, and using FTP, WebDAV and SFTP, upload these files into the remote web server, like the other HTML editions.

Drawbacks of Dreamweaver: Dreamweaver has the potential of producing HTML pages with file size and HTML code amount bigger than a page which is optimally hand coded. This is a drawback, as it causes the poor performance of the web browsers. Earlier, many website developers have criticized Dreamweaver for producing codes which do not comply many times with the standards of W3C. There has also been a poor performance by the Dreamweaver 8.0 on the Acid 2 Test that had been developed by Web Standards Project.

Syntax Highlighting: For several languages like Action Script, Active Server Pages, ASP.NET, EDML, Cascading Style Sheets, C#, ColdFusion, Java, Java Server Pages, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, HyperText Markup Language, Extensible Markup Language, JavaScript, PHP, Visual Basic, Wireless Markup Language, and VB Script, the recent versions of Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting. You can add to its selection, language syntax highlighting of your own. Code completion is also available for some of the above mentioned languages.

Language Availability: The Adobe Dreamweaver comes in a number of languages like English, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Italian, Korean, German, Swedish, French, Turkish, Brazilian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and Portuguese.