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Page 1 of 3 Right now. Head over to Adobe Labs and download the public beta of Dreamweaver CS4. That's right. It's available to play with and explore immediately. In the next few days, Community MX will introduce you to some of its most tempting new features. This particular article will give you an overview of some of its sensational new CSS features. Keep tuned over the next few days as we introduce you to such features as the new interface, the Code Navigator, additional workspace options, and Spry enhancements.
Tip: Be sure to read Jim Babbage's article about the new public Fireworks beta, also available for immediate download on Adobe Labs.
Before we discuss features, you should be aware of the terms of the beta. According to Scott Fegette, product manager for Adobe Developer Relations, this is how the beta will work:
Warning: You need to remember that this is beta software. Some things may not work, or not work as expected, and some things may change by final release. Also, Adobe wants you to test things out and report back when something goes wrong.
Image 1: A CSS page that we'll use to demo some of the new CSS features in Dreamweaver CS4
If you were ever frustrated by how CSS worked from the Properties inspector; if you ever hated the "style1" auto-generated name and other clunky naming conventions; and if you were ever confused by the fact that you couldn't edit existing CSS rules in the PI, then you're going to be in heaven when you try out Dreamweaver CS4.
OK, listen to this: The Properties inspector, new name Properties Window, now has two buttons, one for HTML and one for CSS. Clicking either button takes you to a contextual tab for that kind of Properties Window. The image below shows you how the Properties Window looks in both its HTML and CSS versions.
Image 2: The enhanced Properties Inspector has two buttons, one for CSS, and one for HTML
The HTML portion of the Properties Inspector may look pretty much the same, but it has one very, very important addition — or should I say subtraction. It no longer produces deprecated code!
I used to want to scream after my students and I carefully worked through constructing their web standards markup and style sheets, only to have them click on the text alignment buttons in the PI while working alone during lab time. Pretty soon, their pages were littered with align attributes. They also ended up with lots of style1, style2, etc. auto-named styles that went into the head of their documents. They became confused about why those embedded styles did not work across multiple pages of their sites.
This is huge. Even newbies will be protected from bad practices. Of course, I may not get to feel superior as often when I spy on the source of many web pages. Ah, the Lord giveth, and He taketh away. :-D
Keywords
Dreamweaver CS4 public beta, CSS features,
