As a WYSIWYG IDE (integrated development enviroment), 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 criticised 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.
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