For online content, Macromedia Dreamweaver is one of the most popular WYSIWYG HTML editors. Unfortunately, like Microsoft Word, it is often misused17.
Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editor is, as noted above, imprecise and you cannot make many edits without having recourse to the source code. Templates are very important. Dreamweaver uses templates much in the way that FrameMaker does to add format to XML content. Dreamweaver imports XML into templates and generates HTML directly. Dreamweaver also exports XML content, which is efficient for people who like to work in HTML, but want the 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 XML18, 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 interprets as badly-formed XML19. 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[4]. 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 Macromedia Dreamweaver is that many people feel comfortable with it. It is another learning step, but a relatively easy one to understand how to import and export XML in Dreamweaver. Again, it is of paramount importance that the templates into which XML is imported are used verbatim. It is a very good idea to have those templates generated by expert consultants if sufficient Dreamweaver-specific expertise does not exist in your organization.
