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Macromedia DreamWeaver continued

Layers

Layers can be added to float above each other (though only viewed in 4.0 browsers) as well as used to add animation, Flash and other multimedia effects without any scripting. Layers can also contain text, images, plug-ins and even other layers. It is relatively ease to add simple effects such as rollovers by using the ready-to-use Javascripts that are included in the package. Layers offer pixel-accurate positioning of objects.

For designers this offers many tempting ways to spruce up a static page as layers can be overlapped with alternating text and images. Though this requires extra bandwidth on the users side, such advances will hopefully be equaled by the release of more powerful modems.

CSS Support

The program offers excellent support for emerging Web technologies such as cascading style sheets.

The Styles palette lets you easily define text styles that can be used throughout a document. You can also link Web pages to an external style sheet, a separate document that contains only the styles used throughout your site. When you redefine the styles as they appear in the style-sheet document, all the documents in your site that are linked to the style sheet change automatically.

Included in DreamWeaver are sample style sheets and a very designed tutorial. Compared with the awkward way that Microsoft's Frontpage deals with CSS, we found it easy to apply style sheets once we explored the numerous options.

Timelines

This feature allows complex animation to be created using DHTML features that change over 'time'. This is accomplished without the need to know any ActiveX, Java or downloaded plug-ins. The Timelines Inspector allows control of properties of the layers through a series of frames over time. It options allows changes to the positioning, size, and ordering of the layers.

Users who are new to such techniques may try to squeeze as much information as possible into one large Timeline. Instead of doing this  - and crashing DreamWeaver - it is better to work with several separate Timelines. This allows greater control of the layout and makes debugging easier.

Different Timelines may be created that will trigger separate animations. By using such complex arrangement the web page can be make increasingly dynamic. The number of frames within the animation can be changed by setting the total number of frames and, in turn, the number of frames per second (fps). This should satisfy most web-savvy designers who yearn for extra options to boost their pages.