In San Francisco, Macromedia are putting the finishing touches to the successor to the MX family, the snappily-named MX2004 family.

We all know that the jump from Dreamweaver 4 to MX was a major enhancement to the functionality of Dreamweaver, while the Flash users got a pretty incremental rather than revolutionary new release, and this time it’s the other way round. Flash splits into two products, Flash MX2004 and a professional edition (which has the high-end features like video, and all the Rich Internet Application functions). Both new versions of Flash are now extensible.

This time Dreamweaver gets the evolutionary tweaks rather than massive upgrade, but that’s not to say that they won’t prove very useful to your workflow. Many of the DMXzone community have asked for a better FTP suite in Dreamweaver – that’s been added to MX2004.

CSS support is the mosty significant improvement. It’s fair to say that MX allowed many developers to move to CSS development – or at least start exploring it, and these days most people are at least aware of the advantages of CSS over tables. The trend continues, and DMX 2004 has some CSS templates built in. The best feature, from examining the beta code, is the browser/ CSS checking feature. We all know that some broswers support some CSS properties better than others. DMX2004 allows you to specify which browsers to target and Dreamweaver will automatically make sure pages are not using tags or CSS constructs that those browsers do not support. Useful indeed – it’s almost impossible to store that knowledge in your head, it’s a pain going through the Netscape CSS support tables, and now that the major browsers are frozen, we’re going to need to know the list of bugs and exceptions for a long time to come.

Other than these enhancements, the main changes are to the workflow and the look-and-feel. The full list of ‘why you should upgrade’ is on the Macromedia site http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/productinfo/upgrade/#01.

We’ll be looking in more depth at some of the forthcoming features and reporting back in the next few days. Meanwhile, let us know whether you plan to upgrade on the DMXzone poll.