Part of our business, as you may know, is filing public companies' documents with the SEC in HTML format. What you may not know is that we most use a very limited subset of HTML: no cascading style sheets, no nested tables, no span tags, etc.

So when we tried to use Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 for some editing, we were dismayed to find that CS4 no longer supported applying font tags through the GUI toolbar. CS4 forces you to use CSS styles, which we aren't allowed to use.

A lot of Googling revealed that a number of people are finding this approach problematic. Once they start asking for help in forums, the CSS police show up and the conversation invariably goes something like this:

"Help! I need to edit font tags in my HTML documents, how can you do this in Dreamweaver CS4?"

"You can't do this in CS4, you have to use CSS. Furthermore, you're a technologically backwards and horrible person."

"But I'm editing thousands of legacy documents / using a system that doesn't support CSS."

"Too bad! You should update your system/documents!"

So there seems to be a complete lack of support for and a complete demonization of the people who need to use HTML attributes for formatting. Dreamweaver offers a number of javascript and XML files which allow a high level of program customization. Unfortunately, many features that previously worked in this regard seem to have been deliberately broken in the backend.

While I was not able to add enough features for our own needs (we'll be downgrading to CS3), I was able to get paragraph alignment and basic font colouring working. I hope someone finds this useful.

INSTRUCTIONS: Download attributes-toolbar.xml and place it in
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Dreamweaver CS4\configuration\Toolbars\
When you open Dreamweaver, right-click on the top toolbar and check "AttributesToolbar". Then you can drag it to the bottom of the screen so that it's next to your properties.

I imagine the file will work with the Mac OS X version as well, but you'll have to figure out where to put it (I suspect somewhere in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/...)

P.S. - To the CSS gestapo: not everyone who uses HTML is a web designer, so keep your self-righteous comments to yourselves!