Dreamweaver CS3 Can't Render My Fancy-Pants CSS

Question

Hi everybody,
My company does CSS/XHTML design. I think we do pretty good
stuff— of course we're still learning, but we do OK. We're
currently in the midst of a site redesign for Haverford College,
and this time we're going all the way: pure CSS, tableless, XHTML
strict if we can manage it.
I have used DW MX 2004 since, um, 2003, and have had no
reason to upgrade. But now that we're doing pure CSS layouts, they
tend to show up wonky in MX 2004, so I'm planning to upgrade to
CS3. I am working with the trial version now, and I'll be damned if
the display of the site isn't WORSE than it is in MX 2004.
This wouldn't be a big deal, as I usually work in the code
anyway, but DW CS3 is about to be approved by the client as the
standard method of having administrators do site updates. This
means every admin at Haverford's going to open up their page, look
at this, go "oh, no, my site's b0rked," and try to fix it. Disaster
will ensue.
Here is the evidence.
The home page is browsable at
http://haverford.demo.babywhale.net/.
As you can see, it validates (transitional for now, as
there's some mockup content in there). It also looks consistent
across FF, Safari, and IE6 and 7. (We'll look at other browsers
later in the dev process.)
Now check out how horribly screwed up it looks in DW CS3:
http://www.whitewhale.net/screenshot/dw.png
http://www.whitewhale.net/screenshot/scroll_to_right.png
We are doing some sort-of-fancy float-based layout in there,
but man, if IE6 can read it, why can't Dreamweaver?
Can anyone offer any advice? I'm starting to sweat this one a
little. I figure my options are either (a) go back to a table,
which would cause at least one of my employees to quit in protest;
or (b) spend a lot of time tweaking the CSS so that it shows up
properly in DW, which would be the most annoying
browser-compatibility debug EVER; or (c) create a bunch of
DW-specific tools (like design-time stylesheets, and so forth)
meaning that the admins would have to do a lot of custom
configuration along with the DW CS3 install. Or (d) tell the client
we have to find another solution besides DW because of our fancy
layout, which they're certainly not going to be happy with.
OK, I've blabbed long enough. If anyone has any ideas,
similar experiences, or suggestions about which of the preceding 3
options I should go for, please let me know. Thanks!
Jason

Answer 1

Jason,
> I figure my options are either (a) go back to a table,
which would cause at
> least one of my employees to quit in protest; or (b)
spend a lot of time tweaking
> the CSS so that it shows up properly in DW, which would
be the most annoying
> browser-compatibility debug EVER; or (c) create a bunch
of DW-specific tools
> (like design-time stylesheets, and so forth) meaning
that the admins would have
> to do a lot of custom configuration along with the DW
CS3 install. Or (d) tell
> the client we have to find another solution besides DW
because of our fancy
> layout, which they're certainly not going to be happy
with.
Another option:
(e) Turn off CSS Style Rendering in DW Design View:
View > Style Rendering > Display Styles
Also available on a toolbar:
View > Toolbars > Style Rendering
This gives you a view of the semantic structure of your page
which is
fully editable.
Hope this helps,
Randy