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Microsoft Expression vs. Dreamweaver
An anonymous reader writes "Informit has a quick look at Microsoft's Expression suite consisting of Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer, and Web Designer in comparison to Dreamweaver. It seems that Microsoft got tired of relying on FrontPage and is actually going after professionals. From the article: 'What designers might not realize is that Microsoft finally drank the Kool-Aid. The Expression Web Designer application walks the Web standards walk. One caution: Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET. Microsoft built the ASP.NET platform; it isn't a surprise that Expression Web Designer was designed to support that platform. This is obviously a drawback for those designers who work with PHP, JSP, and other non-ASP.NET platforms, making it difficult for Microsoft to expand its reach beyond the ASP.NET users.'"
"Walking the web standards walk" sounds nice at first, but Microsoft has a history of creating rather varying definitions of standard compliance that often didn't relate to web designers' own experiences. I skimmed the article, but didn't see a comparison of how well the code is supported in non-IE browsers.
The Expression Web Designer application walks the Web standards walk. One caution: Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET.
The same attitude that leads MS to believe they can ignore standards (essentially, writing their own) is what leads them to believe they can ignore other "standard" practices, like using a variety of tools, platforms, and development schemes.
In other news, Microsoft has decided to start releasing to the world "air," which will be an alternative to whatever it is you are presently inhaling. MSAir will not contain any oxygen, so it may not be of much use to some users.
They're not as contradictory as it first appears really.
Web standards pretty much determine the markup output server-side and how that markup is rendered in the browser. ASP.NET 2.0 is a server-side technology that outputs XHTML compliant code that will work in any browser - no ASP.NET stuff ever gets near the browser.
In that respect, ASP.NET is as web standards compliant as any other server-side technology - PHP, JSP, anything - it's virtually irrelevant to what gets output and arrives at the browser.
However, you're right in that Expression looks and feels half-baked. Visual Studio.NET is just fine for putting together 'professional' ASP.NET stuff, so why you'd want to release a product that overlaps is beyond me, especially when pages adhering to web standards can be put together in notepad if you know what you're doing (which from experience a lot of web designers don't).
Dreamweaver doesn't create sloppy code any longer. Adobe.Macromedia has done a great job of improving Dreamweaver, including CSS support. One can create strict or transitional xhtml right in the code view - no more garbage is inserted. A lot of the JS snippets haven't changed, but if you do that, you probably have your own library already developed. DW is a tool for rapid application development. It's faster than hand coding, and produces excellent code when used correctly. This wasn't always the case, but to be fair, DW8 is excellent.
Businesses have this "comfort" mindset that if it is MS software, it will integrate ok. They won't be 5 years down the road saying, "I wish we had done it the other way."
The company I worked for does just under $100M USD per year, so they are not especially small, but also not especially large. MS's main selling point is that a business like that can use MS products because they integrate everything together. There were fears about going onto other platforms because you might (oh my god!) have to hire an employee who knows how to run an enterprise-class software operation. This costs lots of $$ and people who can do that are few and far between.
ASP.NET was brought alone to keep developers in these mid-sized corporations from going to technoligies like JSP, servlets, etc. The problem is no one at the company wants to hire anyone who knows how to do either the open source or windows. It's a catch-22: Can't get the nice customer-integrated website because we don't know Java or C#, but we are taking an awful risk if we hire several people at 70K-120K per year to get this thing for us.
Thus Microsoft has a vast untapped user base that they are trying to persuade to businesses hire those software engineers who can write the killer apps for the company. ASP.NET was the MS answer to JSP, but what MS didn't realize when they spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing .NET that companies like the one I worked for are too small to hire a dedicated Java or C# programmer for web programming. I don't think they're trying to kill JSP- they will never succeed in doing that. Java has many advantages over C# and large corporations that run in heterogenious environments are going to choose Java.
So, with untapped user base = untapped money for MS. They saw a "hole" in their solution for businesses when JSP came out, and they are trying to plug it right now.
I have been talking with good designer friends for ages about that issue.
What I have come to understand is that Dreamweaver is a great app for web development.
What I finally understood, and they confirmed, is that the wysiwyg part of Dreamweaver is not what makes it so great.
They love it for the integration it provides, and powerful management of project (searches, publishing, that kind of stuff).
They don't use the visual editing, because it doesn't produce profesional output, and editing right into the code view is much more reliable.
If that is your case too, plus, you are proficient with common console tools, like grep/diff, and using shell scripts to perform batch jobs like changing jpegs resolutions, you can replace Dreamweaver with Quanta Plus, or the lighter Bluefish. All the help you need for editing html and css. And remember to install ies4linux , so you can see the result on IE, too.
If that is not your case, keep DreamWeaver and try to be happy. But stay away from NVU, that's only useful for mockups or very quick and small stuff.