Adobe Adds HTML5 To Dreamweaver As An Afterthought
If you’re a web designer, web user or a human being who’s touched a computer in the last year, you probably know that HTML5 is kind of a big deal.
Well, nobody told Adobe that. Having just shipped Adobe Creative Suite 5 you’d expect the world’s leading creativity software maker to be up on all these new fangled web technologies.
Actually, Dreamweaver, the Creative Suite’s HTML authoring tool has very little in the way of support, but Adobe has realized this and has released the Adobe HTML5 Pack as an extension.
The extension contains several useful tools for web designers, including code hinting for HTML5 and CSS3, WebKit engine updates and support for the new video and audio tags. Adobe has also bundled sample and starter layouts to help designers get started quickly with HTML5.
Source: Adobe Press
[Insert bandwagon Adobe Bash here ]
Hi,
It’s a bit harsh to say it’s an afterthought. There may be a lot of buzz about HTML5 but it is an as yet unfinished standard so from one perspective it’s a bit much to expect support to be included by default for an unfinished spec. Dreamweaver gets updated about every 18-24 months and they don’t update much inbetween apart from essential bug fixes, so adding support for the unfinished HTML5 spec via an extension after DW CS5 is released makes a lot of sense. That way they can keep developing and updating it as often as they want without having to do a full software update for Dreamweaver.
DW CS5 even without this HTML5 pack will happily render HTML5 tag elements in design and live view quite happily as it uses the WebKit framework for rendering pages, as such it gets most of the feature support that Safari and other WebKit browsers. It’s just that there’s no visual interface to let people work with HTML5 tags, you just have to write the code for it instead. Adobe’s HTML5 Pack adds a lot of convenient code hints to make this process easier.
It’s an easy target to try and accuse Adobe of ‘not getting’ HTML5 but that’s really far from the truth, and I say that as someone who welcomes HTML5 / CSS3 etc replacing Flash’s dominance (misuse!) on the web.
Kinda hard to believe adobe’s had so many huge “oops” moments lately. At least they finally are fully compatible with OSX with this CS5 release… an os that’s only been out for 10 years…lol
Maybe they are just too caught up in this whole “why doesn’t Apple love us?” thing to actually make software beneficial anymore.
Hope they aren’t planning on charging extra for this “pack” – why not just make it an update?