New at Macromedia.com, Designing with CSS in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 looks at building a flexible, standards-based CSS and XHTML layout using Dreamweaver MX 2004.

Before you ask, yes, I did do it without any hand-coding. Dreamweaver has come a long way this year. Whilst it’s still not up there with my favoured combination of Homesite and TopStyle, at least this kind of this is now possible with Dreamweaver. As I say at the beginning of the article, Dreamweaver MX (previous version) was fine at rendering simple CSS layouts and even making basic edits, but you couldn’t really work with it. Macromedia has made vast improvements to the page rendering engine in MX 2004 resulting in most CSS layouts displaying pretty much as they do in Internet Explorer. Almost as importantly, MX 2004 has a new set of tools for creating and editing CSS documents. All this new functionality is essentially version 1, so it’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a good start.