Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS4 Bible

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W

hen I first started with print and design layout, I would drive all

over the city to finish a job. After receiving the client’s go-ahead,

I had to pick up my type from a phototypesetter and my images

from a stat house. Then, back at my studio, I’d cut and paste—and I mean lit-

erally, with scissors and glue—the text and images into place, hoping against

hope that I had specified the type and image sizes correctly. If not, it was

back in the car for another trip or two around town. Ah, the good old days.

Now designers (especially those who design for the Web) have the luxury

of developing their creations right in their own studio. Until Dream-

weaver, however, the development of a Web application often undertook

a faster, albeit parallel, course to my inner-city travels. After a basic page

was designed, complete with server-side code, the document had to be

uploaded to a testing server and then viewed in a browser over the Internet.

If—make that when—changes were needed, the pages were revamped back

in the studio. Because the designer was not able to lay out the page with the

actual data in place, modifications were a trial-and-error process that often

required many, many trips to the server and back.

Dreamweaver’s Live Data view eliminates the tedium and the lengthy time

required for the upload-preview-modify-upload cycle. It enables developers

to work with the layout while t ...