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Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal!

Posted by timothy on from the view-askew dept.

Barence writes "Here's an interesting blog post by a designer who reckons Dreamweaver is dying. It's not Dreamweaver's fault, though. Nor is the problem Adobe and its development team — the last Dreamweaver CS4 version was the most impressive release in years. Moreover, although Microsoft Expression Web poses a far more credible threat than FrontPage could muster, Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available. The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically."

4 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Good riddance. by jonadab · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen some of the HTML these tools (Frontweaver, Dreampage, HotMetal, etc) produce, and I Do Not Want It.

    I use Emacs and w3schools, and my HTML is clean, scalable, efficient, reasonably accessible, and very maintainable, and honestly I don't spend that much time on it. HTML is, fundamentally, very easy, once you know what you're doing.

    In terms of keeping all the pages on a site updated with side-wide changes, I mostly use a combination of keyboard macros, custom elisp, Perl, regular expressions, chewing gum, and bailing wire. But it works, and it works the way I *want* it to work.

    As far as Drupal, though, I thought that was a CMS. Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor? Ugh.

    --
    Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    1. Re:Good riddance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor?

      The point is that once you've got the template set up (or downloaded a theme or whatever), you DON'T use an html editor anymore. You type your content into your little box and hit the save button.

      Or did you use Dreamweaver to write your comment here?

  2. Re:Is Dreamweaver good? by pwizard2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm quite partial to Bluefish myself for web development work.

    --
    "It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
  3. Dreamweaver & Standards Compliance by weston · · Score: 4, Informative

    When was the last time Dreamweaver gave you standards compliant code (Actually, as a slashdot user, you probably never used Dreamweaver

    You might be surprised. I definitely prefer Vim myself, but at my last full-time job, most of the other coders used Dreamweaver and periodically, I'd fire it up... either because I found myself doing something where it was kindof nice to be able to interact with the page visually, or just to understand what the other guys liked about it as a tool and how they used it.

    To my surprise, at least with Dreamweaver 8, the code was pretty standards compliant. You could set which doctype you wanted for your (X)HTML, CSS support was decent, and could set it to warn you if you did something that violated the standard. Heck, I think you could actually even set it up to validate arbitrary XML documents.

    There were some other nice features. It's sortof nice having an integrated FTP client to save you a trip to another app, the sitewide search and replace function was certainly a little friendlier/convenient than some of the unixy ways, "clean up word html"...

    I don't miss it all that much myself, but honestly, I can see why some coders see it as a good tool to work in. Maybe that'll be enough to save it as a product.

    --
    Tweet, tweet.