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Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal!
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."
I highly doubt this, I check NetCraft daily, and I've seen NO confirmation of Dreamweaver dying!
Congratulations on getting first post. A copy of Microsoft Windows Live Expression Web Express Edition is in the mail.
I've never tried it, when I do web design I do it with Gimp, Vim and Firebug. And I think that combo works great!
How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim? Is it advanced enough to not fool users to use css styled text for strong expressions?
Drupal et al make life a whole lot easier when it comes to updating a website and adding content. But what about the design?
Unless you want to stick to the default Drupal (or insert CMS here) themes, you'll probably want to design your own CMS template so people get a unique feel for your website. You'll still need to fall back on your classic static web-design skills using programs like Dreamweaver (or notepad).
Dreamweaver isn't dying, it's just falling into a more specialized category now. If you just used Dreamweaver as a way to update content, then you were really failing to use the program to it's full potential.
It's true, most people who make sites in Drupal, Wordpress, etc. clearly didn't spend more than 10 minutes on the design.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Even Microsoft already did what had to be done for that. Integrate the tools with the content management system, duh!
Sharepoint Designer is pretty much Expression Web made to modify Sharepoint's dynamically generated pages. Point Sharepoint Designer to a Sharepoint site where you have required permissions, and have fun. All the power of a content management system, all the power of design and web development tool, all at the same place.
Adobe and Dreamweaver are in an even better position for this. They could work with the open source community, and various vendors (like Alfresco), and make Dreamweaver work the same way Sharepoint Designer works, but across a variety of content management system. The idea of something like Drupal and Alfresco with Dreamweaver having the same kind of integration as MOSS and Sharepoint Designer is quite exciting, in my opinion, and has far more potential.
Don't forget Drupal modules. Themes and modules don't magically appear from the void, somebody writes them, and this requires an editor.
Am I doing this right? The whole comparing 2 different things?
Veryu misleading title. The story isn't about Dreamweaver but the dying of static HTML editing tools of any kind, contrasting them to the changing web. The web is becoming more dynamic. Some HTML editing tools are very static. Therein lies the problem for the old tools.
That's the drag queen singer/performance artist who's working on a reality show, right?
Well, developer has utmost freedom to redesign theme from scratch or mod currently available ones, here are some websites done in drupal, check it out:
more here and here.
I completely agree however, drupal != dreamweaver.
o_O
The parent is correct, this is a static vs. dynamic web transition. I suppose "DREAMWEAVER is DEAD" is catchier.
Now, if we can just get ahead of the game on plugging those CMS security holes.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Dreamweaver will always have a place next to microsoft word for helping moms everywhere create hideous, 1990's-era web pages.
Posted anonymously because I have one of those moms, and I'd hate to break her heart. She things her pages are awesome.
It's true, and Dreamweaver's autocomplete is fantastic.
I don't think there is much place for the GUI in template design, but the text editor in Dreamweaver is worth the money if you are a designer at a lower skill level.
Considering one would need the other apps in the suite, keeping Dreamweaver will be a perk.
Adobe should focus on making it a full fledged AMP (and others really) testing environment and it would be potent.
Easy local testing, their sitemanager to sync with remote, fantastic text editor, and maybe even some integration for template previewing (maybe they do?). I personally only use it to help be remember the names of various CSS properties and what they can be set too, but there is definitely potential to make designers more comfortable with interfacing with the server, as they have tied to do from the start (and I hate).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
From the blog post:
The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the navigation necessary to help users find it, just isnâ(TM)t scalable or viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be posted by the content contributor, whether thatâ(TM)s the site owner or site visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around that content on the fly.
This particular paragraph leads me to think the author has never actually used Dreamweaver - he certainly doesn't even understand the fundamental concept of "templates". I mean, who is manually adding navigation to a large site on a page by page basis?
Thing is, there are a lot of circumstances where "Web 2.0", in the limited sense the author seems to understand (that is, end-users providing added content), doesn't do much for you. There are only a few places on your typical corporate or government web site, for example, where this would make sense. Certainly there are specific applications where this would be handy; but they're fairly narrow and can be handled well by adding some wiki software alongside the "mainstream" website.
Now the tools of Web 2.0 - e.g. dynamic, javascript-driven pages with sql backends - are a different matter. But really Dreamweaver-style templating works just fine with those, IMHO, to the degree one is going to use any tool to make those pages anyway (meaning there's a significant amount of hand-coding happening with the page-specific content).
Personally speaking, I've found Dreamweaver templates (that I've put together) very handy when combined with Contribute. Really the templating is mostly what I use it for; both for allowing other staff to easily maintain content and letting me easily push section-wide and/or site-wide changes to our several-thousand-page web site (templates can be nested, which is quite handy). I know I'm only using a fairly restricted subset of what all Dreamweaver can do; but it does that pretty darn well. Certainly other software can also do this - but I haven't seen anything that works quite as well in all regards.
#DeleteChrome
Yeah, this entire thing just sounds like FUD. Granted CMS's are the way to go for content updates but but unless you're a mom and pop shop you don't want to stick with a template... and that means hiring a designer... and that means using design tools.
CMS is just a fancy way of saying, "Keep the secretaries out of the friggin' HTML because they always screw it up." Handing Dreamweaver over to someone with no experience was always a joke.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The real problem is dreamweaver code sucks compared to anything a decent programmer can just type out in notepad. The question becomes, would you rather use an open source CMS, code your own theme and get good code. Or would rather blow $400 on a piece of software that's going to spew out something totally unusable. Investing a little bit of time learning how to do css goes a long way.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
the best html/css editor is any editor with syntax highlighting used in combination with brain.
Yes, it's true we web-designers can (and generally) do use simple code editors to write our pages, templates and CSS stylesheets; the fact is that there is an ever-growing population of people who want to make their own website, not just pre-compiled garbage templates that Drupal users install- but real personal templates made by the site owners themselves... in order to do that they need a good editor that HELPS them- Dreamweaver does that.
Also, seriously, WTF does Drupal have to do with it? Sure, I'm not knocking Drupal I've used it on some projects, but it has nothing to do with the REAL tools required to do a job (mainly a brain, fingers, and motivation).
I am open source, and Linux baby!
Lets not forget that Dreamweaver does more than WYSIWYG sites, it has a pretty decent code editor in it with built in libraries for JS, .NET, ColdFusion, HTML, JSP, PHP, ActionScript, Java, and others. I've actually used it quite extensively for straight code as it does a decent job of highlighting tags and the project organization is pretty nice too.
I have opened up Dreamweaver a few times but prefer doing things by hand in Notepad++. There are plenty of free and open bulletproof css templates for getting the basic layout of any site started and from there diving into your own code helps you better understand what you are doing. I am sure Dreamweaver has its own crowd but between a good CMS and hand coding I have never felt behind the curve.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
I'm just saying dude, that nobody died and made you Emperor of the Internet so you know, we're all perfectly able to mess around and build our own websites even without your permission. And even without knowing everything there is to know about CSS and HTML. Farkknocker.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Architects no longer needed due to rise in demand for modular homes.
Ridiculous, right? My point exactly.
... so I can neglect to send flowers.
For too long, too many self-described "web designers" have relied on Dreamweaver and its ilk to do their jobs for them. These people are not "web designers", they are graphic designers who think web documents are a blank canvas to be painted on, such as when they open a new file in Photoshop or Illustrator. The web is not a 3-panel brochure.
This delusion is fostered by their uninformed clients and bosses who only consider what looks good and how fast (cheap) it is produced. Little explicit attention is paid to usability, readability, or accessibility.
Good riddance, I say. The day these monkeys no longer have a crutch can not come soon enough.
Dreamweaver attempts to do the WYSIWYG which is geared towards those people who don't really know how to code.
DW has its place due to site management and debugging tools, and it doesn't force the wysiwyg. When I use it, it's usually with the mixed text/graphical view, because it is faster to zero in on certain parts of the code graphically by clicking there, then switching to the code pane.
Essentially, it's much faster to scan a picture than text, even if your markup is tidy, and it is nice to see the less-frequent available parameters for CSS in a pane rather than pull all of them from memory. DW's code has improved quite a bit over the years, too, it isn't the ugly mess it once was.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Dreamweaver was great if you want to code ColdFusion, Flash, and Flex. For a full IDE it beats Visual Studio in many features. Eclipse and other free "IDE" don't come close in terms of responsiveness and user friendliness. The problem is CF/Flex is a small percentage of the web compared to PHP, ASP.NET, Java, and a host of new platforms and frameworks (Django, ROR, etc.). Now with the advent of open source CMS and wiki systems, even for .NET, plus free plug-ins for Eclipse to code just about anything, along with shrinking IT budget, WHY would anyone pay the equivalent for full VS for it? The Server + IDE has been Adobe's bread and butter for years, that's why it's critical for Adobe to keep pushing for AIR/Flash. The only way to make DW popular again I can see is embrace open source languages and new frameworks, and lower the price.
This is not news.
Modern Web-CMSes and feasable CSS made DW design capabilities and it's offline templating system completely superflous somewhere back in 2002 or 2003. In fact, I posted very much the same analysis on this issue about 5 or 6 years ago here on slashdot. Whatever is left of DW is here to stay for those doing the actuall screen/HTML design. The rext of us uses CSS frameworks and foundation templates and simply replaces the GFX and/or the colorcodes. I haven't used DW longer than 5 minutes since back in 2001.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I switched from doing everything in vi *to* Dreamweaver. I like having function lookup, automatic upload capability to the remote site, built in O'Reilly docs, etc.
That said, I'm working with Dreamweaver the same way I did with vi, all typing, no layout. In addition, as I do some ColdFusion work, having that grammar built in too helps a lot.
A designer might need Dreamweaver
Anyone doing design (artwork rather than page layout) isn't going to use Dreamweaver. It's great as a WYSIWYG html editor. From a design standpoint, it doesn't do much else. No raster or vector creation (unless you've decided to try the Celik CSS polygon method).
The only people I know who still use it are coders who find the extra features it provides in terms of editing and site management useful. In this sense, the article is quite correct -- Drupal and Wordpress and other software are eating away at the market that used to see Dreamweaver as the option for editing webpages without knowing HTML. Now CMSs do that.
Given that Dreamweaver really isn't a design tool either, usefulness as an IDE is pretty much the last thing Dreamweaver really has going for it.
Tweet, tweet.
As alluded to in my post, it allows me to see a list of CSS properties (in a drop down that can easily be ignored), and then once I typed in the property, it gives a list of appropriate values.
It does not make things quicker, it helps me keep track of the correct properties and values, since I don't do it enough to it all perfect, and it is quicker than browsing a reference site to see, "what type of border styles are there?"
It does not interfere with the performance at all for me, and it does not obscure the text I am typing. And I can certainly click the dark green on the color wheel it pops up quicker than I can come up with my the hex values (though I bet dark green is a predefined color, I would know if I were typing this in dream weaver).
We don't all do this all day, yet some of us need to do it sometimes. And with a pretty good grasp of the concepts (better than a lot of designers I am willing to bet), the auto-complete helps fill in the details (that I have worse than most designers), and it does it quicker than using the web for a reference (which I do at home), or even the giant O'Reilly CSS reference book by my desk.
If you don't have access to DW Screem has a pretty decent start to it. When you type less than, it pops up a list of tags instantly, in DW this list shrinks as you type. That's not too useful, but when you hit space, it pops up a list of attributes, and only ones that apply to the tag you just types/picked. This makes it easy to see what you can do with a div, or a span. These are things that take a lot of time to just "know", so the fact that your editor does it can be helpful for beginners, or people who don't do it day in and day out.
DW does it far better than screem (it works with CSS for starters), and that is worth something.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
1. Designer - Design tools such as Photoshop, illustrator etc (not my role!)
2. Front end developer - Photoshop (for slicing and dicing PSDs supplied by the designer), text editor (I'm using Geany at present) and lots of browsers.
This is pretty much the process I've used when I've been involved on the client side, and while it can have its problems (many designers who've never actually had to code a site have trouble groking liquid layouts and other web-centric design issues), it seems to be the best setup. People who are good coders and talented in both art and visual communications are rare, so it makes sense to divide the labor.
The one thing that surprises me about this process, though, is that almost everyone uses Photoshop to do the artwork. This seemed like a basic fact of life to me, until I ended up working at a shop that did everything in Illustrator, and I was surprised to find out how much better this setup was -- not only did the artists seem to be more productive, the vector artwork seemd a lot easier to take apart however I saw fit as a coder. After working there for three years, it's been kindof painful going back to working with PSDs, and I wonder how much of the industry has every tried both given the apparent advantage of Illustrator...
(And this is to say nothing of Fireworks. I mentioned it in the parent and don't want to sound like a broken record, but if Illustrator is better than Photoshop for this stuff, Fireworks is another 10 times better -- it's all the good stuff about both integrated into a program expressly designed for making websites, and it's so good at its job that I don't understand why its product cousin Dreamweaver gets all the fame.)
Tweet, tweet.
Speaking as someone who's got some schooling and background in graphical design: No, I wouldn't hire that designer. Photoshop is just that much more useful. Odds are the "designer" working with gimp will be spending so much time coding that he won't be doing much real work. Even with the film gimp modifications etc, it can't compete with Photoshop, really. And that's feature wise.
When it comes to workflow/UI, it's even worse. GIMP is designed by a programmer for another programmer, thinking that it works well for everyone. Photoshop... well, let's just say that when I tossed it in front of my dad the first time yeaaars ago, as a photographer without previous computer image editing experience, he found it perfectly intuitive. That's because hundreds of graphical artists, photographers etc have shaped the forming of it over the years, and the Adobe coders having to do it the way the artists like it. Another awesome program from Adobe that has no match at all in the Open Source world: Lightroom. Yes, the program can be sluggish when working with large pictures/large collections. But it's still better than the alternatives, because you get an excellent overview of what you're doing.
That's a serious problem with GUI/workflow development, and most obvious in the Open Source world: If you come with suggestions for improvements, you may just get told to fuck off, basically, which happened to my dad. He spent about 5 hours writing an email, outlining what he thought needed changing in GIMP after testing it.
Try using Django. kthxbai
To be fair, that's more MTV.
Does that mean web developers who use Django get their money for nothing and their chicks for free?
Are you really comparing Dreamweaver with Drupal? My God. Some poor schmuck is now ditching Dreamweaver and installing Drupal 7.x ( it is the latest so it must be the greatest ) wondering why they need to know their mySQL login credentials for a replacement to DW. Oi.