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Macromedia Dreamweaver

For online content, Macromedia Dreamweaver is one of the most popular WYSIWYG HTML editors. Unfortunately, like Microsoft Word, it is often misused7. Templates are very important. Dreamweaver uses templates much in the way that FrameMaker does to add format to XML content. Dreamweaver directly imports XML into templates and generates HTML directly. Dreamweaver also exports XML content directly, which is a big savings for people who like to work in HTML, but want the extra advantages of an XML repository.

.75in .5in NOTE: Dreamweaver does a good job of exporting the editable portions of templates as XML. However, it only checks whether the content is well-formed XML8, not whether it is valid XML.

HTML via Webworks-FrameMaker may not behave well in Macromedia Dreamweaver, since it has less tolerance of HTML code that it thinks badly formed9. It should be noted that using Adobe FrameMaker to write HTML results in web sites that lack many of the features needed for richly interactive eLearning[5]. Webworks-FrameMaker works best for document based learning, where a large volume of information must be provided to the student as reference material.

The big advantage of Dreamweaver is that many people feel comfortable with it. It is another learning step to understand how to import and export XML in Dreamweaver, but it is also relatively easy. Again, it is of paramount importance that the templates into which XML is imported be used verbatim and that they have been created by dedicated experts in Dreamweaver template creation.



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root 2003-07-21