(October 2007: It should be noted that since this assessment, the Spry Framework has undergone revision. We are currently assessing the newest version and will report our findings.)

Sadly, at this initial stage it seems that the goal of easy-of-use has been held higher than even the most basic principals of valid markup and accessibility best practise. Opting to make implementation as simple as possible, Spry uses custom attributes and old-school obtrusive JavaScript techniques, welding the behaviour layer firmly to the content.

On the subject of custom attributes, Adobe’s Donald Booth responds:

We were trying to stay away from custom attributes for validation reasons. But, there was no way to implement if...then statements with out one. And we were defining the datasets within the class attribute. This was troublesome, and since we were already breaking validation with the if...then, we decided to go to all custom attributes.

Replace “breaking validation” with “breaking our customers’ pages” at your own discretion.

Of course, Spry is just a preview and Adobe are actively soliciting feedback. As it currently stands, the framework is certainly not ready for prime-time, and if it’s the sort of framework you’d otherwise find useful, we’d encourage you to investigate it and offer constructive feedback.

One such example is Microformats. As a rapidly evolving area of development, it makes sense to implement support as an extension rather than wait for another product cycle to come around only to find the state of the art has changed. Extensions are fairly quick to implement and can be easily updated with time.

The DWTF thought it would be good if we produced some basic extensions to help provide support for Microformats in Dreamweaver. A public beta is available today.

In this release we have support for hCalendar, hCard, rel-license, rel-tag and XFN, which is a strong start. Hopefully we can improve these based on feedback, as well as adding some more in the future.

Written by WaSP member Rachel Andrew of the Dreamweaver Task Force, and tech edited by Group Leader Molly E. Holzschlag, Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website Using Dreamweaver 8 is apparently everything you need to create standards compliant, accessible, cross-browser compatible websites with – you guessed it – Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.

Sample chapters are available, and the book is shipping right away. When asked to say something witty for the folks at home, Rachel uttered:

My aim was not only to show existing Dreamweaver users how to work with web standards, but to also help out those who are already up to speed with standards but need to know how to apply that within Dreamweaver.

Of course, Rachel isn’t the only DWTF member to be working on book projects, and we hope to have more exciting announcements for Dreamweaver users later in the year.

The Project is very pleased to welcome both Jesse and Stephanie as Task Force Members.

The WaSP Dreamweaver Task Force was created in 2001 to work alongside Macromedia in increasing support for web standards in their flagship visual web editor, and also to communicate to the user community how best Dreamweaver can be utilised for standards-based design. They also like eating cookies, making paper planes, and carving miniature paddle-steamers from disused car tyres.