As previously noted, there a a few things about Dreamweaver just waiting to ruin your plans for your site. This next one gets everyone, all the time…
Never Believe Dreamweaver’s Design View
For newcomers and old hands alike Dreamweaver’s Design View feature often confuses and confounds by failing to render an accurate preview of a web page.
How Firefox renders a particular navigation bar.
How Dreamweaver's Design View renders the same code. What navigation bar?
There’s actually quite a good reason for this and that is that Design View can’t be a web browser is because it has to be an editor.
You can’t follow links, run javascript etc in it as you could in a web browser but you CAN edit text, insert pictures and edit Ajax widgets. Editing is what Design View can be very helpful with.
What Design View is plain unable to do is give you an accurate preview of how your page will look when viewed in a browser. That’s why the Preview in Browser… command is there and don’t you forget it.
The trouble is that anytime someone uses the Design View to make an edit they run the risk of falling for an insidious trap…
Because Design View looks quite a bit like the way your web page might in your favourite browser there’s a tendency to, however much you consciously may know better, to start thinking of Design View as What Your Page Looks Like. This is WRONG. Wrong but everybody who uses Design view forgets it at sometime or other and begins to believe… and in believing begins to forget these Dreamweaver Truths:
If your page is working in Dreamweaver’s Design View but not in a your target browser this is because there is Something Wrong in Your Code. You almost certainly won’t be able to fix it via the Design View. Go to Source. Do not pass Go.
If your page is not working in Dreamweaver’s Design View but is working in your target browser this is not a problem. It’s easy to waste time trying to fix rendering bugs that are only displaying in Dreamweaver. Forget it. It doesn’t matter. Who’s going to view your pages using Dreamweaver. You. That’s all. If your pages are working in your target browsers be happy.
What to believe about Dreamweaver’s Live View feature
From Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, Adobe have added a Live View feature that embeds Webkit into Dreamweaver for more accurate previewing of your pages. Should you trust Live View as a preview?
Well folks you can only trust it as a preview of browsers that use Webkit, which is Safari and Chrome and a few others… Meanwhile keep on testing in various flavours of IE and Mozilla…