At Google I/O conference today, Adobe Systems, Inc. announced a new extensions for Dreamweaver which will ease HTML5 web development. Being an application extension, the ‘HTML5 Pack‘ enhances Dreamweaver’s HTML5 and CSS3 handling ability – which we had found lacking in our review.
It introduces many new features for better control over HTML5. The HTML5 pack adds features such as, the Multiscreen Preview panel, that allows Dreamweaver for Live View display on 3 different screen sizes (Window > Multiscreen Preview), with Media Query support; code hinting for the HTML5 Tag Library with new tags, attributes, and properties; and for the existing tags, code hinting for new attributes and values are updated for seamless workflow.
The HTML5 pack also adds code hinting for many new CSS3 specifications or updates existing specifications with newer attributes and values; including 2D/3D Transformations and Animations, Background and Border, Basic User Interface, Line Layout, Marquee, Media Queries, MultiColumn, Ruby, Text and Transitions. The CSS3 rendering Live View has also been improved to comply with the new specifications. To extend this feature further ahead, it provides support for the <video> and <audio> tags in the live view, if the system has Quicktime pre-installed.
Apart from the live view, the extension offers better rendering for new tags in Design View also implying the very little use of external browser to get an idea of the actual runtime design output. The HTML5 starter layouts, added to the New Document Dialog box, help the developers to get booted into a new HTML5 project with ready made templates which adhere to HTML5 principles.
It is true, that the standards for HTML5 and CSS3 are not completely ready, but Adobe claims to have implemented the specifications in their current state. In this light it makes sense to have this as an extensions which can be updated separately as the specifications evolve, rather than a core part of the application.