What is Dreamweaver?
This is like saying that a nail-gun can completely replace a hammer. A nail-gun will nail the boards together, but it is an imprecise tool, and there is a certain amount of danger while using it. If you can’t occasionally fall back on the hammer for more detail-oriented work, then there’s a definite limit to what you can build. A skilled carpenter knows how to use the hammer and occasionally does so when the nail-gun just isn’t doing what is intended. Dreamweaver, like the nail-gun, is designed to make your life easier. You may never learn HTML or CSS, but without knowing them, you are limited to Dreamweaver’s way of doing things. This is not altogether a bad thing: it is simply a slightly narrow perspective on a large field.
Dreamweaver is a web page editor, designed to allow users to create web pages with a wide variety of features without having to write the HTML code by hand. It’s designed to be “what you see is what you get”. What you design in the Dreamweaver ‘document window’ will be coded and placed in the document, so that the browser will display the page just as you see it in your Dreamweaver window. Dreamweaver differs from Netscape in that it will not change existing code in a document (unless you ask it to) and it has a larger array of functions, including some site management functions. Dreamweaver MX 2004 is part of the Macromedia Studio suite of web editing tools, which also includes Fireworks, Flash and Freehand. Dreamweaver MX 2004 can be used in conjuction with Macromedia Contribute to facilitate distributed website creation and editing.
