Macromedia Dreamweaver
Macromedia Dreamweaver is an HTML editor developed by Macromedia. It was originally targeted at professional web designers and offers an editing system that combines both the productivity of WYSIWYG design with the control of HTML code editing mode. This combination was quite unique in late 1990s and helped Dreamweaver to a widespread adoption. It is currently available for Mac and Windows and holds about 80% of the professional HTML editor market. Dreamweaver is the editor of choice for creating and editing web templates. The latest version is Dreamweaver 8. In addition to native support for Mac OS X and Windows, Dreamweaver also can run on Unix-like platforms through the use of emulation software such as an incarnation of Wine.
As a part WYSIWYG editor, Dreamweaver can hide the details of pages’ HTML code from the user, making it possible for non-experts to easily create web pages and sites. Some web developers criticize this approach as producing HTML pages that are much larger than they should be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards.
Dreamweaver allows you to pick most browsers installed on your computer to preview websites. It also has some nice site management tools for the novice, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters you specify, up to the entire site. The behaviors panel also allows creation of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.
With the advent of version MX, Macromedia incorporated dynamic content creation tools into Dreamweaver. In the spirit of HTML WYSIWYG tools, it allows users to connect to databases (such as mySQL) to filter and display content using scripting technologies such as PHP, ASP, and ASP.net, without any previous programming experience.
As of version MX, Dreamweaver uses the Presto layout engine from Opera.