In promising news for web design and development, Macromedia’s Dreamweaver MX 2004 claims it will possess much more powerful CSS support, as well as significant improvements which will help its users create accessible content. A page from Dreamweaver’s tour presents an overview of its CSS-related features. Susan Morrow, a senior director for Macromedia, is quoted with this statement in an article at MacCentral:

“It’s time for CSS to become the broad standard it should be, […] However, to date, it’s been difficult to implement.”

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In January of 2002, Quark dumbfounded Mac design professionals by releasing QuarkXPress 5 sans support for Mac OS X. Because of Quark’s rush to release an already outdated product, Mac-based print designers have either held back in upgrading from OS 9 to OS X, or have bumbled along, forced to run QuarkXPress in Classic mode, or directly within OS 9. Since I continue to accept print design projects, like Jeff Veen’s latest book, Quark’s incompetence has been one of the reasons I’ve avoided switching back to Mac and to OS X. continued

My hat’s off to the Opera team for pushing out what looks to be a fine browser in the final release of version 7. So far, only the Windows version of Opera 7 is available. As always, it’s lightweight, it installed quickly (sans-Java), and starts up lightning-fast as well (without using the “Quick Launch” cheat.) continued

At last, we may finally have a competitive browser market for the Mac. Apple enters the picture with Safari (v 1.0 Beta), self-dubbed the turbo browser for the Mac. As Jobs likes to do, Safari is compared side by side along with other browsers for speed tests in HTML rendering, JavaScript, and application launch time. A few quick test drives around the neighborhood proves this to be quite true. It certainly seems to be wicked fast at page rendering. Nice Snapback feature, and convenient method to organize lots of bookmarks. Preferences seem rather sparse for the moment, but we’re only at beta stage so far. continued