The Difference Between Dreamweaver MX & Dreamweaver CS4

The changes to Dreamweaver have made web design more elegant than ever.

Dreamweaver is a popular WYSIWYG editor that allows users to click and drag their way to professional-looking websites while helping developers who code by hand apply their craft faster and easier. The series has undergone extensive changes between the MX and CS series, resulting in both programs having a wildly different feature set. Learning the differences will be helpful when deciding whether an upgrade is right for you.

Release Date

The name Dreamweaver MX actually refers to two different versions of the Dreamweaver software released in 2002 and 2003. The acronym doesn't stand for anything, but the brand represented an increasing focus on server-side applications.

Dreamweaver CS4 was released in the fall of 2008 after a pair of intermediate upgrades: Dreamweaver 8 and Dreamweaver CS3. In the time between these two versions, there have been significant changes in web standards---the way Dreamweaver wrote code in 2003 isn't standards compliant today, and hand coders will find the MX series provides little assistance with advanced features that are standard on modern websites.

CSS Support

As Cascading Style Sheets became more popular between the release of Dreamweaver MX and CS4, Adobe brought CSS features to the forefront. CS4 comes prepackaged with CSS layout pages, a visual CSS editor and a CSS management feature that allows users to shift inline CSS to a seperate stylesheet and vice versa.

Live Updates

While Dreamweaver MX users need to reload files in their PC's browser in order to view changes made to their code, Dreamweaver CS4 features integration with a native browser engine called Webkit. This open source engine is the same one at the heart of Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Web Standards

Detail-oriented developers will be pleased with CS4's efforts towards writing clean, standards compliant code. Depreciated tags such as font have been removed and replaced with their modern successors. But as most experience developers know, one of the most difficult tricks of web design isn't just making code that meets official standards, but that handles the individual quirks of the major browsers. CS4's Compatibility Check feature helps to ensure that the final product works in all browsers and monitor resolutions.

Adobe Creative

The rights to the Dreamweaver software was acquired by Adobe between the release of MX and CS3, and Dreamweaver was integrated into Adobe's popular Creative Suite. This means the software is more compatible with popular software such as Photoshop, and the process of importing and exporting between the two has been greatly simplified. In addition, Adobe standardized the user interface between the two programs. If you're experienced with Photoshop, Dreamweaver CS4's menus are much simpler to navigate and vice versa.

Spry Effects

The CS series has added Spry effects: prepackaged sets of lists, forms, navigational regions and scripting effects that can be plugged in to a page. Developers who write complex features for their site or find themselves writing repetitive bits of code will be pleased at how intuitive the Spry widgets are.

References

• Adobe: Introducing Dreamweaver CS3
• Killer Sites: Introduction to Dreamweaver CS3
• Site Point: Six Things To Like About Dreamweaver CS4
• Adobe: Best Practices With CSS In Dreamweaver CS4