Adobe Dreamweaver is a web development application originally created by Allaire Systems, which was acquired around 1998 by Macromedia and is now owned by Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia in 2005.

Dreamweaver is available for both Mac and Windows operating systems. Recent versions have incorporated support for web technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and various server-side scripting languages and frameworks including ASP.NET, ColdFusion, JavaServer Pages (JSP), and PHP.

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As a WYSIWYG Presto-based editor, Dreamweaver can hide the HTML code details of pages from the user, making it possible for non-coders to create web pages and sites. One criticism of this approach is that it can produce HTML pages whose file size and amount of HTML code is larger than an optimally hand-coded page would be, which can cause web browsers to perform poorly. This can be particularly true because the application makes it very easy to create table-based layouts. In addition, some web site developers have criticized Dreamweaver in the past for producing code that often does not comply with W3C standards, though recent versions have been more compliant. Dreamweaver 8.0 performed poorly on the Acid2 Test, developed by the Web Standards Project. However, Adobe has increased the support for CSS and other ways to lay out a page without tables in later versions of the application, with the ability to convert tables to layers and vice versa.

Dreamweaver allows users to preview websites in many browsers, provided that they are installed on their computer. It also has some site management tools, such as the ability to find and replace lines of text or code by whatever parameters specified across the entire site, and a templatisation feature for creating multiple pages with similar structures. The behaviours panel also enables use of basic JavaScript without any coding knowledge.

Dreamweaver can use "Extensions" – small programs, which any web developer can write (usually in HTML and JavaScript). Extensions provide added functionality to the software for whoever wants to download and install them. Dreamweaver is supported by a large community of extension developers who make extensions available (both commercial and free) for most web development tasks from simple rollover effects to full-featured shopping carts.

Like other HTML editors, Dreamweaver edits files locally, then uploads all edited files to the remote web server using FTP, SFTP, or WebDAV. Dreamweaver CS4 now supports the Subversion (SVN) version control system.

[edit] Syntax highlighting

As of version 6, Dreamweaver supports syntax highlighting for the following languages out of the box:

* ActionScript
* Active Server Pages (ASP). Previous versions supported ASP 1.1. ASP support has been dropped entirely in version CS4.
* ASP.NET
* C#
* Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
* ColdFusion
* EDML
* Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML)
* Extensible Markup Language (XML)
* Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)
* HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
* Java
* JavaScript
* JavaServer Pages (JSP)
* PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)
* Visual Basic (VB)
* Visual Basic Script Edition (VBScript)
* Wireless Markup Language (WML)

It is also possible to add your own language syntax highlighting to its repertoire.

In addition, code completion is available for many of these languages.