Dreamweaver 8 and CSS - quick question

They have: 75 posts

Joined: Mar 2000

Heh, I'm racking up a lot of posts lately.... this is a simple one though.

Dreamweaver 8 is supposed to be great with CSS. Well, for those who have it... how great is it? Does it have badly written syntax and such (like what I often hear FrontPage does), or no? Does the CSS it write comply to the w3c standards? If not, are they close? (ie: going in by hand and editing it would quickly make it 100% compliant).

Or would you honestly suggest coding CSS by hand? (I think that'd be crazy if dw8 is supposed to be so great, if you own it of course).

As I said above, I'm going to learn all the languages by hand, but I'm getting dw8 and I wanna use it to the best of it's ability while maintaining compliance to w3c standards.

Oh, this question goes for HTML as well. I'd like to be xhtml strict (or transitional) compliant.

Thanks...

-tallon

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I find it more convenient to code CSS by hand. Dreamweaver does write good CSS but the problem I have is the interface. I don't have V. 8 (only MX 2004 - I'm assuming it's similar), but I generally find the interface to be too cumbersome. Complex dialog box and too many little boxes and things to check. I can do it more efficiently myself.

However, if you don't know the commands or how the synatax work this might be a good way to learn.

Dreamweaver is great for working with standards. It has a validator built in so you don't have to switch back and forth. And then you can jump directly to the problem element rather than having to find ityourself. V. 8 shoudl be up to speed on rendering issues as well - MX can't display my code anymore.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Wait, I do have the trial version of v.8. Forgot I had installed that! Good thing I remembered before the 30 days runs out.

There are a couple of ways to do CSS in here. I'm haven't really looked at the side panels here - they seem rather cumbersome to me but it might be handy to know exactly what styles are applied to a selected element. I'm just playing with it as I type this - there is an easy way to "go to code" which is nice.

So, you can do CSS by creating a new element which gives you a pop-up interface to make your selections. To edit a rule you can go through the sidebar interface, where you just scroll through a list of elements and make your selections. Might be good if you don't know what the elements are and what options they have. When you know all this it is much easier to just type it. I don't know, I could get used to this I guess...

I also really like it for applying CSS to elements. Much easier to select and click than to type all the classes and ID's by hand.

They have: 75 posts

Joined: Mar 2000

hmm. Thanks Smiling.

I am going to start learning CSS soon, so I should know it not long after having dw8. But glad to hear it can spead it up, even if it's faster to hand-code overall.

-tallon

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