Adobe Dreamweaver Team Blog

Good Afternoon,
In Part II of the “What’s New in DW CS4″ series, we are going to talk about Code Navigator.
Code Navigator allows users to easily see the CSS files and rules that are affecting the current selection (or insertion point) and quickly jump directly to the exact rule, right from the Design/Code View window. It also opens and navigates to other file types.
You may have noticed Code Nav already. When in Design View, if you pause the cursor or insertion point for a few seconds, an icon of a ship’s wheel will show up. Clicking on this icon opens up the Code Nav window. (This assumes you have CSS on your page.)
This Code Nav window will show all the rules associated with the current selection, organized by CSS files and internal rules. Mousing over any of these rules will show the actual declarations within the rule. Clicking on the rule will take you directly to the rule in the CSS file (or Style tag) for editing.
The Code Nav window an also be brought up by Alt+Click. Notice that the Code Nav window also has a checkbox if you want to disable the wheel icon. We also added the wheel icon to the Coding toolbar (second from the top). Clicking this will also bring up the Code Nav window.
But Code Nav is for more than CSS. It will also work for:

• Going to Javascript files from the <script> tag.
• Opening server-side includes. (One level deep only)
• Dreamweaver Templates and Library items: Open the dwt from an instance.
• iframes

You will notice that Code Nav works when in Live View (see last week’s post). There are a couple limitations when in Live View, mostly having to do with navigating to includes while in Live View, but the CSS part works well and is quite useful for navigating through rules on the real page.
Code Nav is another good feature that helps you stay in Design/View while providing contextual information without having to go to a panel. This will hopefully streamline work flows and lead to quicker CSS navigation and editing.
That is a wrap for this week. There will likely be a delay on the next post as we head into the holidays.
Wishing you well,
Don

We’re seeing people search for things in Dreamweaver Help — simple things — and coming up empty-handed. There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being the new google search engine that powers Web Help searches and the new Community Help. This blog entry is going to keep a running list of topics that google has trouble delivering for whatever reason.
SPELL CHECK
We see that you’ve had a hard time finding the basic spell check documentation in Dreamweaver CS4. The reason for it is because the command is actually called “Check Spelling” and so the documentation refers to it as such. If you search for “check spelling,” the documentation should come up right away in Community Help or in product Web Help; but because of google relevance matching, things like “spell check,” “spell checker,” and “spelling check” have not been working adequately. We’re trying to adjust this so that it works better. In the meantime, you can get to the topic here:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/10.0_Using/WSc78c5058ca073340dcda9110b1f693f21-7cc8a.html

We’ve been hearing that a lot of people have been looking for the Layout mode documentation in Dreamweaver CS4. As of Dreamweaver CS4, Layout mode is no longer in the product.
Here’s why (according to our magnificent web guru, Murray Summers):
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1. Perhaps most importantly, the old Layout mode in Dreamweaver CS3 and earlier sits between you and *real* HTML tables,and fools you into believing that concepts like “layout cell” and “autostretch” really mean something. They do not. As long as you use Layout Mode, you’ll never learn one of the most important things for new web developers – how to build solid and reliable tables.
2. Actually, #1 wouldn’t be *so* bad, except that the code that is written by Layout Mode is really poor code. For example, a layout table contains MANY empty rows of cells. This can contribute to a table’s instability. In addition, if your initial positioning of the table’s cells is a bit complex, Layout Mode will throw in col- and rowspans aplenty as it merges and splits cells willy-nillly to achieve the pixel-perfect layout you have specified. Again, this is an extremely poor method for building stable tables, because it allows changes in one tiny cell’s shape (i.e, dimensions) to ripple through the rest of the table, usually with unexpected and sometimes disastrous consequences. This is one of the primary reasons for the final result’s fragility – read this -

http://apptools.com/rants/spans.php

3. The UI for Layout Mode is beyond confusing – many options that you might want to use are inaccessible, e.g., inserting another table, or layer onto the page.
To make good tables, keep it simple. Put a table on the page, and begin to load your content. If you would want a different table layout, instead of merging or splitting cells, consider stacking tables or nesting simple tables instead, respectively.
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Thanks Murray!
At the time of the CS4 release, Layout mode was only mentioned on the deprecated features list at the bottom of the What’s New page:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/10.0_Using/WS2C41F19D-502B-4fb5-8A54-4442E2127C84a.html
But now we’ve also put a note in the tables documentation indicating that we’ve removed the feature:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/10.0_Using/WScbb6b82af5544594822510a94ae8d65-7d9fa.html
But since this is buried deep in the many pages of Dreamweaver Help, we encourage you to blog about this feature going bye-bye if you post regularly about this sort of thing.
Jon Michael Varese
Lead Writer, Dreamweaver

Hi,
My name is Donald Booth and I work on the Dreamweaver Quality Engineering team here in San Francisco.
The DW blog hasn’t seen much action lately. But now that CS4 is out the door and the team has had time to straighten our collective desks, I thought I would start a mini-series and discuss the new features of CS4: explain how they work and the thinking behind them.
For the inaugural CS4 post, we will talk about the probably the best new feature in CS4: Live View.
We long knew that the Edit > PIB > Edit > PIB cycle was central to the DW web development workflow. (PIB is Preview in Browser. F12, of course)
But that constant app switching was tedious, as any constant app switching is. Thanks to the open source movement in general, and Web kit in particular, we can help solve it.

Continue reading…