Preface

Websites evolve every year, growing in scope and complexity, with new features popping up to make sites look and work ever better. Even people building personal sites use various programming languages and server technologies to dish up content.

Throughout its history, Dreamweaver has managed to keep pace with the changing web-development landscape, and Dreamweaver CS6 is no exception; it’s capable of doing more than any previous version of the program. Whether you want to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for cutting-edge design, dip into the world of JavaScript-powered dynamic pages, explore HTML5 and CSS3, build websites for mobile devices, use content management systems like WordPress or Drupal, or simply stick to straightforward HTML, Dreamweaver has just about all the tools you need.

Any enterprising designer can create web pages, Cascading Style Sheets, and even JavaScript programs with a simple text editor. In fact, Dreamweaver CS6’s powerful text editor lets you handcraft text files to create basic or complex database-driven pages. However, hand-typing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is not only a recipe for carpal tunnel syndrome, it’s also a slow and typo-prone way to build web pages. Dreamweaver provides buttons, dialog boxes, and panels that let you add HTML, CSS, and JavaScript quickly, with fewer keystrokes. A simple button lets you insert the complex HTML required to build an HTML table in a matter of seconds, for example. And Dreamweaver is flexible enough to let you both hand-code and use its time-saving HTML shortcuts. The choice is yours.

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