Dreamweaver 8 is Macromedia’s newest attempt at developing the most compatible and powerful web site creator and manager. The experiences are mixed. Some of Dreamweaver’s already considerable power has been improved, while some other claims do not live up to expectations. But overall, Macromedia has made this version of Dreamweaver worthwhile upgrading for. And wasn’t that what software upgrades are all about?

Probably Dreamweaver 8’s most needed improvement was in the area of CSS support. The program did support CSS already in previous versions, but the rendering of CSS pages was poor, especially so when complex CSS layouts were used. The good news is that Dreamweaver 8 does better.

Rendering complex CSS pages on which Dreamweaver MX 2004 broke its teeth, do display better in this new version, but it still isn’t perfect. You might wonder why not, with almost every web browser these days capable of displaying CSS pages neatly. Even the venerable Style Master created by WestCiv is capable of displaying CSS layouts correctly, while simultaneously showing you which browsers probably will have a problem with your code.

Another criticism is that shorthand CSS is something Dreamweaver still doesn’t understand. Perhaps they don’t want to, and perhaps with good reason. I validated the CSS stylesheet of IT-Enquirer, which is written pretty much “in toto” in shorthand, only to find that W3C’s validator finds my styles “Not Robust CSS”.

Whatever they say. What does seem to get better with Dreamweaver’s age, is the support for CSS coding itself. Every CSS (and HTML) tag/property/etc. has a working auto-completion component. The CSS panel is unified and the visual aids for CSS code have been improved. In fact, all handcoding has improved considerably.

For example, HTML tags are closed automatically. As soon as you start typing the closing tag, the correct HTML-element for the level that you’re working on will be auto-inserted. That’s quite confusing at first, but very helpful to lazy people like myself.

Tags can be collapsed, which is highly helpful when you’re working on long pages. In one word, Macromedia is trying its best to satisfy handcoders and is succeeding at it, if you ask me.

Dreamweaver 8 comes with a Style Rendering toolbar. The toolbar is hidden at first, but once you reveal it from the View menu, you get buttons for each viewing platform, and the ability to have Dreamweaver show you how the page will look like on every platform.