Dreamweaver A New State of Consciousness?
By Sue Wilcox
The key to the success of
Dreamweaver is in its development. Three months of research preceded the first product specification. Kevin Lynch, head of the product development team, tried to get inside the heads of Webmasters by spending three months researching what they wanted before drawing up the product specification. Kevin put together an advisory council of prominent Web developers and actively involved them in the planning process. Once he'd come up with the name Dreamweaver (based on the notion of the Web as another state of consciousness and the spidery connection between webs and weaving) Kevin worked with the analogy of Web-page creation as the transition from dream into reality. He wrote a series of single-page scenarios describing what it might be like to author with Dreamweaver, based on the practical experience and desires of the advisory council. The team then drew up a list of features needed to support these scenarios. The concept of round-trip HTML came out of this process.
One thing Kevin realized immediately is that most people like to hack their code with a text editor. So, one big attraction of Dreamweaver is that it lets users integrate their favorite text editor as part of its interface; it even supplies the two most popular ones with the product (HomeSite for the PC and BBEdit for the Mac). But once you get past this initial appeal of the familiar, how does Dreamweaver really work? And how does it give you control of your site without spending all your time updating pages?
The Basics
The Dreamweaver interface is based on floating palettes and toolbars hovering over a GUI document window that gives an approximation of your page as seen in a browser window.
