Dreamweaver CS3 - The Good, bad and the ugly.

Though still comfortable using DW MX as well as DW 8, i was looking forward what's new it's gonnabe and was awaiting the new release of CS3 like every designer. Finally when it got released i downloaded the trial version of it and cutchly installed to checkout what's new.

The Good

Overall the drag and drop facility for creating a horizontal or a vertical menu system made life easier for a quite large site having numerous links. Next comes the very interesting spry framework for the Ajax. Quite amazed with the demo's of the spry effects. For a novice like me
the drag and drop utility for XML data connectivity and displaying the same means a lot.

Adding visual effects like shrink, grow, blind, fade for a specific element or a image, by just clicking the desired effect from the Behaviour panel is definitely a plus.

The Bad

Me jump started straight into launching the demo and fiddling around the Spry Framework, laidout few horizontal menu systems, built an accordion panel and when i previewed in IE as well as FireFox, everything looked fine for me then.

When i really opened one of my existing site and fiddling around the code, the code view didn't respond for refresh as well as ... when i tried selecting a particular text / copy in the code view in order to hyperlink in the properties panel.. it didn't refresh or doesn't make the link ... some serious bug.. later i found out many people complaining that DW CS3 doesn't respond / refresh when we make changes on the fly !

The Ugly

I should say, it's one of my very poor decision to trust DW CS3, for my new client's website project. As i mentioned earlier, as i was thrilled using those spry widgets, i was dreaming am gonna rock this site with lots of spry widgets! And i started authoring the site, on the fly previewing pages both in IE as well as FireFox, so over a week's time i finished the whole site. And i sent the first cut version for the client thinking he's gonna like it very much. Client instantly reverted back - "my site doesn't work well with IE 6 and IE7, specifically your accordion thingie doesn't work at all in IE"

"OMG, what a stupid mistake i have done, First thing is that i didn't check my site for Cross Browser compatibility (Which is a basic for any designer), Second, how i can trust a new technology which is just released and am not the master of it yet!"

But later found in the forums, the problem could be if there are no DOC type mentioned!
but what the heck, i have my doc type clearly mentioned right on top of my markup-
then one more solution -"Are you using XHTML or HTML 4.01 ?"
Oh please, why software developpers make life more complicated ?

So, someone already bought DW CS3, will be looking for updates / patches for those bugs! May their souls rest in peace until they get those answers!