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Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver?
An anonymous reader writes "I've been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver, and haven't stumbled upon anything that works the way I need. Aptana and Bluefish are fantastic tools, but I cannot work exclusively with them, since Bluefish doesn't have that WYSIWYG functionality that is so important when you're also dealing with design, and Aptana doesn't have classic ASP support. I don't care much about the classic ASP support, but, even though I'm a PHP developer, I give support to classic ASP code on a daily basis. What open source tools are you guys working with out there? I'm really not looking for a Dreamweaver clone, just a tool that gets closer to cover my needs: WYSIWYG, PHP, HTML, CSS support, and less important, classic ASP support."
Is quite nice, not sure if it meets your ASP needs though
Just a comment on WYSIWYG, I'd recommend opting for the browser instead. I've found that most tools that put a WYSIWYG mode into their UI end up mis-implementing parts of the rendering engine, and you end up opening 3-4 different browsers to figure out javascript and css "bugs" (more like oddities in how the browsers render code) anyway. It's convenient for simple things, but if you're doing anything sufficiently complex on the front-end, there's no substitute for good old fashioned cross browser compatibility testing.
Silverlight targets flash, not Dreamweaver, it is a framework not dev tool - the dev tool would be Visual Studio or MonoDevelop). The former is closed source, the latter won't do what he wants.
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll recover from your lobotomy soon.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Really?
I use HTML toolkit for raw HTML editing but notepad++ is also good but he is not asking for that.
He wants a dreamweaver replacement. I would like one as well. Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything. And you always have an option to put it in your editor and edit it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
BlueGriffon, developed by the guy who gave us Nvu is well worth a look. It's a free open source WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Agreed. WYSIWYGs like DW only seem to muck up all the hard work I put into making my html look clean and concise. They add their own stupid DIV tags and ugly CSS code making it impossible to understand what's going on should you need to make edits without them. Think of it like writing source code, then trying to edit the assembly code when you make edits.
WYSIWYG is not professional for many programming tasks, but for designers, unless you are in the scientific community, and sometimes even then, WYSIWYG is pretty much the professional standard. You'd probably have better traction saying OSS isn't professional (which might have worked 10 years ago... but isn't so true now).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
You should definitely try Amaya
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
How can it? In terms of car analogies, the comparison for the GPs answer is:
Question: "Hey, I need to buy a new vehicle. I need a dealer with a good price, stands behind their warrantees, doesn't have high pressure sales people, and sells Toyotas."
GPs Answer: "I really like the Subaru Impreza."
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It has been years since I checked, but I don't think there is such an animals.
Last time I asked I got pointed to html/text editors and got a pious sermon about how I didn't really need a WYSIWYG editor.
I didn't, but when the web designer for my company showed me what his work was like I was convinced that he could use a text/HTML editor, but it would take him 5 times as long to do his job.
That is the problem with the OSS community....developers working without a layer of people who are willing to listen to users to find out what they need instead of arrogantly telling them what they will find useful.
Design in the browser and use Sublime Text 2 it's free to use but you can buy a license and it supports most any language.
For 8 years now I use eclipse for all my web development. With additional plugins development is pretty easy and I have never ever thought of using Dreamweaver again. I am pretty sure that there will be a plugin for ASP support too.
Yup. I keep my webpage loaded in Chrome and just refresh whenever I make changes. That is my WYSIWYG.
And I can always use the Chrome Developer Tools to quickly see what a CSS or HTML tweak will do to my page before I go into my code and change it for real to test it.
Actually, in terms of car analogies, Silverlight would be more like this:
Question: "Hey, I need to buy a new vehicle. I need a dealer with a good price, stands behind their warrantees, doesn't have high pressure sales people, and sells Toyotas."
GPs Answer: "You should get a lawn mower."
I'm on the server side of web development, but HTML/CSS gurus I work with mostly use Firebug for all their WYSIWYG needs. They need to test in plethora of browsers and produce high-quality code, so relying on any individual IDE for visual design would be impossible.
That being said, maybe take a look at Komodo Edit (choice of many HTML/CSS coders I know), or figure out how zen coding works by trying it with one of the supported editors here.
P.S. What I am trying to say: if you are serious about your work, you don't need WYSIWYG. Even if you are a hobbyist, you don't need it.
WYSIWYG editors are wildly helpful when it comes to saving time and opportunities to typo your code. If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.) If time and accuracy are no object, it's a hobby or you're learning. In those cases, by all means, use a straight up text editor, because you're writing web pages for the joy of doing it, or you need to do it more to practice and get better at it.
For the rest of us, who do this sort of thing for a living, or as a time-sensitive project, we need pages coded quickly and accurately, which is why we (convince our employers to) pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for products like Dreamweaver. The split view in Dreamweaver is really useful for doing tricky layouts. Let the program do the heavy lifting by dropping in whatever blocks/tables/whatever that you need, tweak the code as necessary to get the desired result, push the changes up to pre-production, and get on to the next thing that needs to be done ALL WITHOUT SWITCHING WINDOWS. It doesn't leave out tags, it doesn't typo parameters, it doesn't forget the name of that one variable you need to change to get what you're looking for.
If you're shunning tools to make you more productive in the name of intellectual purity, you're just being difficult and spiteful to yourself, your boss, your employer, your client, or any number of other stakeholders, people who need to see the work done for a reason other than to demonstrate you can do it.
tl;dr: No.
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
And that's why Designers have no business doing programming tasks. Designers *design*. They focus on looks. That's their job. The last time I saw a web page built by a designer, it took 30 seconds just to load the page because they added so many wordpress plugins to make their site look "just so".
People seem to have this bizarre notion that just because one is able to make a computer do something, that makes them a programmer. I can wield a hammer. Does that make me a carpenter? No. I have a drill with a selection of very fine drill bits. Does that make me a dentist? I sure as hell hope not.
Not everyone has the luxury of a large, diversified staff. Some people have to wear a lot of different hats.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually, in terms of car analogies, Silverlight would be more like this:
Question: "Hey, I need to buy a new vehicle. I need a dealer with a good price, stands behind their warrantees, doesn't have high pressure sales people, and sells Toyotas."
GGPs Answer: Here, have a sandwich! It's packed full of vitamins and nutrients and it will make your belly full. Look at the nice presentation on this sandwich. It's cut into tiny triangles.
There's no such thing as a good WYSIWYG any more. Unless there's something out there that will generate previews using Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari all in the same tool, and that tool is also an IDE that you're looking for.
Find a good text editor or PHP IDE and use tools like Chrome DOM Inspector or Firebug for Firefox to tweak your CSS and view its results in real-time.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I've been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver, and haven't stumbled upon anything that works the way I need.
You've given a couple of criteria, but the question that I think needs to be asked/answered is why are you looking for an alternative? Is it for ideological reasons, or are you hoping for a cheaper product, or does Dreamweaver not measure up somehow, or...? Knowing the answer to that question could take the discussion on a different path.
This question crops up a lot on Slashdot ("I want an open source alternative to ...") and it always generates some interesting discussions, along with mentions of products that may be new to people, and that's good. But it often seems (or is blindingly obvious) that the questioner is really just looking for an open source product "because I want to support open source". And that's fine as far as it goes, but at some point you have to go with "the best tool for the job is abc".
Depending on your context, "best" may change. For some people, the most important criterion is it's affordable. Open source sometimes meets that requirement better than closed source. But just realize that if you go for open source software just because it's open source, you may get something that's inferior in terms of feature set, ease of use, or other measures. If it's for personal use, and you're okay with that, dandy. If it's for business use, however, and you're trying to proselytize, this may not be the way to do it.
To each their own.
I consider myself a professional web-designer, and when it comes to HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, I haven't touched a WYSIWYG editor in aaages. The only thing I use a WYSIWYG application for is for the initial mock-up of a design (in Inkscape or Illustrator etc), after that I craft a clean and semantic HTML page (in vim, but obviously any text-editor works for that), then I start styling, adding extra DIVs along the way if needed. Then I start moving the HTML over into templates and move on to the server-side bits.
I find that writing the HTML is very trivial and a WYSIWYG editor just gets in the way of producing clean and semantically correct HTML, and I'd be surprised if using that for authoring fully featured websites is actually a 'professional standard' these days.
Anyone who thinks WYSIWYG means anything when dealing with HTML is sadly misinformed.
CSS support has gotten better, but I'd still think this classic sums it up pretty well:
http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2006/06/24/time_breakdown_of_modern_web_d/
I'd link to the original source (http://poisonedminds.com), but the URL no longer works.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Great advice for novices or amateurs. I do work in a web shop, and all the designers here have access to Dreamweaver licenses if they want it. I can't remember the last time any of them actually used it. They all have Creative Suite Web premium or whatever it is, photoshop, etc. They are more productive without Dreamweaver. You want to see what your code looks like in browser? Then look at it in a browser. Editors are for editing, and browsers are for .... browsing. Works great.
Post before yours (in my stream anyway) was for VIM. I think that counts.
End the FUD
SilverLight. They technology behind it stunning. You can also use C# to developed. For video sites there's also a HUGE difference compared to flash - with SilverLight the client and server will adjust to the available bandwidth the user has.. in flash this would just show up the loading icon and stop playing. SilverLight is technically much better than Flash.
Makita. They power drills let me build anything. So why not web sites? You can also use your hands to use them. For tables built with power drills there's also a HUGE difference compared to hammers - with Makita the carpenter and sitter will adjust to how quickly they can drill.. with a hammer this would just show up as unfinished nailheads sticking out on the surface. Makita is technically much better than a hammer.
*picks up his fat paycheck from Makita* Welp, my work here is done.
My work here is dung.
Dear eldavojohn,
we also make hammers now. Your paycheck has been cancelled.
Signed,
Makita.
You understand that not everyone has the same goals and requirements that you have?
As a piano player, I always felt that the ukulele was a terribly limited instrument. The range too small, only four notes at a time, not a lot of projection. Until I played the ukulele and realized that an entirely different level of expression was possible with an instrument where you could manipulate the sound-creating elements directly with your fingers. But of course, neither a ukulele or a piano is a chromatic harmonica or a hammer dulcimer.
Just because you value certain attributes of a tool for creating a web page doesn't mean everyone does.
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
The guy asked a simple question, and as usual he is told, "No, you mustn't want what you want, you must want what WE want!"
So, let me repeat the question: What's the best open source replacement for Dreamweaver? Points off if your answer is a text editor.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Use Notepad++ and have a web server running on your local machine. Code, refresh, code, refresh. Dreamweaver was a dead-end evolutionary branch of web development.
but it bears repeating - WYSIWYG IS BAD. Learn to write HTML, it's very easy. I know, I know, I'm bordering on flamebait here, but I'm gonna say it anyway. And I'll readily admit that Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG helped me quite a bit when I was learning HTML, but most editors that use WYSIWYG have quirky implementations and don't render quite the way a real browser will. I ended up spending more time troubleshooting and digging through generated code trying to make things work than I would have it I had just sucked it up, put on my big boy pants and wrote my own code. It's fine for a beginner as a tool to help learn, but nothing more. If you have a dual monitor setup, open a browser on one screen and the editor (if you insist on open-source, I recommend Notepad++) in the other, and every time you make a change in the editor, hit refresh in the browser. I promise, if you take the time to learn HTML properly and invest a little time and energy up front, it will be well worth it in the end. --Potential DBag comment-- I own a small web dev shop, if you walked in and applied (even as a "designer") and you couldn't hand code basic HTML/CSS and needed a WYSIWYG editor to do your work, I would drop your resume in the trash on the spot. I don't expect designers to be code masters, but in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason why a designer shouldn't be able to take their images and turn them into decent HTML. --End DBag comment--
While I DO have Dreamweaver at the office, I myself don't use the WYSIWYG portion of it. I have a dev server running that I do all my visual testing on, and do the rest of my coding by hand. I've developed sites for smaller individuals as well as larger clients, such as hospitals. At home I use Geany, and find it's code editor to be superb (and the console integration in the Linux version makes it almost completely unnecessary to alt-tab away from the software).
What you might want to consider is adjusting your workflow; mine works like this:
Mockup in Photoshop
Export graphics, get dimensions and colors
Write template files (just the XHTML)
Write stylesheets
Test templates to ensure layouts are golden
Split out templates into PHP files (or whatever else you're using) for includes
Code back end, working from files loaded onto dev server, and test.
Then, go live.
I've been doing web design/dev for approximately 11 years now. When I started I did use Dreamweaver's IDE and WYSIWYG editor for stuff such as tables, but eventually (about 8 years ago) I made the switch to hand coding everything. Once I got comfortable with it, I found that I was working MUCH faster. It helps if you attempt to visualize your markup while you're doing mockup. Also, ensure that you're only using tables to display tabular data (if it makes sense to put it into a spreadsheet, then it makes sense to put it into a table, typically). Tables for layout create unnecessary headaches and can slow development time down significantly; Good CSS markup can accomplish pretty much anything with a fraction of the code, also reducing load time.
I myself can code the layout for a moderately sized site in a day, typically. The two slowest parts for me tend to be mockup (waiting for inspiration to hit) and content migration (fighting with clients to get content). Also, I don't code the site until I get signed approval for the mockup, to avoid wasting time redoing a layout. Minor tweaks obviously aren't an issue, but many clients have a hard time understanding what's minor and not (not their fault, but a headache none-the-less).
Hopefully this helps. If not, feel free to ignore my ramblings and keep soliciting more advice :)
I'm with you. Real men don't use WYSIWYG editors- Real men eat bags of glass. Real men chew on the lit ends of highway flares. Real men lift their cars with one hand while they change a tire with the other. If someone can't do any of this, save us the trouble of mocking you and go join a burlesque chorus line.
BlueGriffon is another editor that does HTML5, CSS3, SVG, and MathML. It is also extendable. Not exactly what you are looking for but what you want may not exist. Anyway you might want to check out BlueGriffon too.
Open source is great. I use open source tools whenever possible, but only up to a point. My productivity is more important, because, ultimately, that is what my livelihood, and my family's well-being, is based upon. When a professional-grade open source tool is available, I'll use it preferentially. I'll even *buy* it or make contributions to the developer.
Now, in my experience, Adobe makes excellent products. Really, quite very excellent, and the open-source alternatives are far behind. When I'm still at a level for some task where I'm just screwing around, then open-source grade tools are fine. When I've risen to the level of getting paid for doing that task, and Adobe's asking $300 for a tool that will radically increase either my productivity or the quality of my work product, or both, then that's money well spent (and, depending on circumstance, also a tax deductable expense in the US). Heck, $300 is only a fraction of a billable day. For a highly useful tool? That's an expense hardly worth debating.
Just buy Dreamweaver. If you're being cheap, then find a used copy that's one version old (ie, CS4) on eBay or Craigslist, and somehow justify the extra time to buy that rather than just ordering Dreamweaver immediately.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Absolutely true .... I've never used a WYSIWYG HTML editor before that didn't make a mess of the original code. BUT, until the day comes along where someone's able to build one that produces only clean code? It's the nature of the beast.
IMO, web sites really take two basic forms (with a lot of "gray area" in-between in some cases). Either you're essentially building a web APPLICATION ... a relatively interactive site that does data lookups from a back-end database, and/or interfaces with other Internet sites to pull and filter content for re-display, OR you're building a more static site intended to serve as a business's "shingle on the net", or photo gallery, or ?? The folks doing the later are usually far better served with apps along the lines of Dreamweaver (or on the Mac side, I prefer such tools as Rapidweaver with 3rd. party plug-ins and extensions). A full grasp of HTML code isn't even really necessary to do a good job with sites of this sort. Much more critical is a good sense of style and design, while hanging onto the concept that part of that impression the site makes on viewers involves loading time, as well.
The coders like to call these more static, design-oriented sites "less professional" because they clearly weren't hand-coded, and the HTML source is typically a big mess. But quite frankly, they're also the sites I see that are usually the most visually appealing and when done properly, have the most efficiently organized layouts of their content too.
But, but, but you can also use C# to developed!
So, let me repeat the question: What's the best open source replacement for Dreamweaver?
Emacs! :-)
Points off if your answer is a text editor.
It's not a text editor! It's a lifestyle!
Agreed. To put things in perspective a little bit:
I design and print artwork for a living. I *could* create all my vector prints using Postscript, and all my raster images using a hex editor and encapsulating the image data between Postscript tags prior to print. In fact, I could then rasterize these files for print by cross referencing all of the color data required on a pixel by pixel basis, then converting this pixel data into the bit format (including header data and possibly frame order) of the inkjet I want to use. Oh, and then I could send the data to the printer, bit after bit after bit, making sure I close the data connection so I can ready for the next job.
I actually do have the knowledge to do all of those things, and for the most part I could provide pretty good results, once I was done debugging and manipulating the data. But it would take hours or days to complete a single job. By using tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, a RIP, ICC profiles, a proper printer driver, etc) that automate all the boring, repeatable, and tedious stuff, I'm far, FAR more productive. Sure, there's no way in hell I could edit an .eps from Illustrator by hand due to all of the extra crap in the file, or modify a data stream on the fly, but it "just works".
I don't think it's unfair for web developers to want to find tools that automate their workflow. The arguments about "bloat" or "30 seconds to load the page" or "can't edit the code" aren't complaints about WYSIWYG in general; those complaints are about shitty WYSIWYG applications. Lean on the companies companies that make these programs instead of leaning on the folks that want to use them, because automation is badass and here to stay.
Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything.
As in "fast, cheap, or good -- pick two?" I
I've notices that ten years ago before these types of programs became widespread, pretty much any page would render well on pretty much any browser or monitor. Now, I go to Yahoo News using FF on IE7 and the goddamned video window covers the text. I go to most sites with my phone and it won't render at all.
Fast and lazy produces junk that kinda sorta works sometimes under some circumstances. Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere. Whether or not to use a tool like Dreamweaver depends on whether or not you want quality, and whether or not you know how to code. And IMO if you don't know HTML and CSS you shouldn't be producing web pages in the first place.
Free Martian Whores!
I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person...
I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement.
NVU http://net2.com/nvu/
Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus
Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/
Hope this helps the original poster.
Oh and if you just want free as in beer.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express
I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's not as user friendly, but you can use sed and awk to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
It's not as user friendly as Dreamweaver, but you can create templates of pages, transform an XML page into something that's supported under HTML and do so efficiently. What's more once you've got it set up, the amount of time it takes to update the site is quite small and you can even completely change the formatting without too much effort once you've done a new set of templates.
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
The trouble is, you still wind up with HTML and CSS, except that it won't render well on but half the screens and browsers, you will have no idea how screwed it is on any screen you haven't tried it on. You want to place objects on a blank page. What's the aspect ratio of your blank page? What's the orientation of your blank page? How big is your blank page? Is your blank page a six foot wide mural, or a phone screen? Design for one and it will suck on the other. Design for portrait and it will suck in landscape. That's why HTML is a markup language; no two screens are going to render the same, and the more you try to force it, the worse it will render.
These tools all produce crappy code. How good is your phone at understanding voice commands? Well, that's about how good these tools are at writing code.
Free Martian Whores!
I don't know if I've seen this site posted here before, but has anybody checked the Open Source Alternatives site, www.osalt.com? Sure, they're not always totally up-to-date, but the do accept software suggestions if your favourite application is missing from the list...
They also only identify open source alternatives, not freeware alternatives (e.g., Paint.NET is not listed as an alternative to Photoshop, since it is simple freeware now and no longer open source). This can be a good thing or an annoying thing, depending on your goals (I use Paint.NET because it's a helluva program, despite not being OS any longer, and the user base/plugin support is amazing).
From the Dreamweaver page, alternative options include:
Quanta Plus 3.5
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
For quick and effortless web development - Quanta Plus is steadily becoming a worthwhile competitor to the commercial web editors on the market. Quanta Plus's features include multi-document... Read more
Aptana 2
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Aptana is an html/javascript editor, however, it does not provide any WYSIWYG feature - but it is still an amazing editor with many advanced features. Aptana is intended for people developing dynamic... Read more
Bluefish 1.0
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Eventhough Bluefish is not a WYSIWYG editor - it is still considered a strong tool, however, mainly for experienced web developers/designers. Has support for unicode - and provides wizards for -... Read more
Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.0
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
SeaMonkey settles all of your internet application needs in own package. Its a web-browser, email and newsgroup client, HTML authoring program and IRC chat client all-in-one. In most areas -... Read more
Amaya 10
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Amaya, developed by W3C, is a web editor/browser that creates and updates documents directly on your website. W3C (WWW Consortium) needed a framework that could include as many of their technologies... Read more
Nvu 1.0
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Nvu is a web development system primarily developed for Linux but is now also available for windows and mac. The project aims to be an open source alternative for the major commercial web authoring... Read more
KompoZer 0.7.7
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Kompozer is an open source web development tool built on NVU. The project strives to fix bugs in the NVU project and added new features to it. Both the HTML editor as well as the CSS editor has so... Read more
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere.
...if your website is rather simple. Otherwise, you still need to code around the remaining IE problems, and the problems in older versions of IE (the publishing firm I work with STILL has clients using IE6...so I still have to code for IE6...) and the non-standard features of different browsers (ever use Javascript event handling? Try to make something follow a mouse cursor? Opacity in CSS?) and let's not even get into if you want to use HTML5...
They focus on looks. That's their job. The last time I saw a web page built by a designer, it took 30 seconds just to load the page because they added so many wordpress plugins to make their site look "just so".
And it's hilarious, because its isn't going to look "just so" unless the user is using the exact same monitor/screen, same resolution, same aspect ratio, same orientation, and maybe even same browser.
I can wield a hammer. Does that make me a carpenter?
Yes, but it doesn't make you a competent carpenter. That takes training and practice, like everything else.
Free Martian Whores!
Dreamweaver used to be excellent until the CSS clowns went and mucked up HTML. Dreamweaver 3 really was WYSIWYG, worked on pure HTML, and didn't require knowing HTML. Dreamweaver today has a display window and an HTML window, and you need to work in both, plus fuss explicitly with CSS values in other windows. It's still quite useful.
In the post-CSS era, almost nobody has decent round-trip HTML editors. Instead, we have "content management systems" which generate bad HTML in bulk, and can't read what they write. This is the main source of web page bloat.
The open source alternatives listed are far worse. I've tried Nvu. They had the right idea, but couldn't keep up with the changes to HTML. Also, there's a difference between an single-page HTML editor and something like Dreamweaver, which manages files for the whole site.
That's a dumb comparison.
Dreamweaver is a lot of tools into one.
Most HTML people I know use it as a nice text editor.
I have also seen fresh from school designers use it as a WYSIWYG editor, with awful results.
I don't mean that it's impossible to use Dreamweaver effectively as a WYSIWYG editor, only that it's not its main strenght in practice.
That 's why so many people say that you can replace it by a text editor, because so many pros use it as a text editor.
I was wondering about that. I always thought Dreamweaver was some sort of Click&Drag developer tool (a la Visual Studio Web RAD?) that mostly tried to get you to use Cold Fusion. However, because Cold Fusion is...let's not talk about full fledged enterprise applications in Cold Fusion. It's not the point and I just got off my blood pressure medicine.
Anyway, later on because no one was using it, they bolted on php/ASP and some other stuff too, right? Or am I completely off on this?
Seeing discussions of WYSIWYG verses raw coding prompts me to ask,
from a project design point of view,
what are some good methods to have various ways of generating code cohabitate?
From the comments in this thread I see different ways of design:
- Some arrange CSS as design and use a WYSIWYG tool for that, but code html content by hand and leave it at that.
- Other people use photoshop for mock-ups and then get a team to make-it-so.
- another way I've seen here is using CMS and then trying to tweak those ContentManagementSystems
- the other thing about WYSIWYG is that it can help with visualising the overall project more quickly. You might also use something like Dreamweaver to do something specific on a handcoded site that would otherwise be a lot of work
How do take the advantages of each of these kinds of approach and get them to mesh efficiently?
If one doesn't use a CMS then we have to have our own methodology.
It reminds me of when I first met a professional musician. We both had sample libaries but somehow his system worked so much better for him than mine did for me. Same for photographers too.
In the same way what I'm looking for is to learn from the professionals how to organise development in addition to learning things like html5 which I'm out of date on. What are the resources for this?
A blog I run for the wealth
I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person... I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement. NVU http://net2.com/nvu/ Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/ Hope this helps the original poster. Oh and if you just want free as in beer. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.
I hadn't heard of Blue Griffon, so I looked it up and found that it is made by the same guy who made Nvu all those years ago. Nvu hasn't been updated for over 6 years, so as a result the community forked it and it became KompoZer. Now, though, KompoZer hasn't been updated in almost 2 years. The other options don't appear to be faring much better on the release front. It looks like Blue Griffon might be the way to go at the moment.
You are correct, however...
Many people doing exactly the sort of work that the OP seems to want to do find that they are better off and more productive using a somewhat different workflow than what most people trained on DW use. Anyone's mileage may vary, of course, but here's my recommendation, based on quite a few years in that very business:
There is no open source drop-in replacement for DreamWeaver.
In my opinion, this is a good thing, because DreamWeaver is a pretty good code editor, with a mediocre at best 'WYSIWYG' design tool which produces bad (at best) code which I can only recommend for throwaway designs you will never have to change or support. The code produced has gotten MUCH MUCH better than it was a decade ago, but it's still crap I wouldn't want to have to deal with later.
So, I use a real graphic design application to design the appearance. I then use a good code editor to write good, clean, standards compliant code to implement the design. As I code, I view the result frequently in multiple actual browsers, so that what I see is what I will REALLY get, in all its quirky varieties. When the browser looks just like the original comp, we're golden, at least until the requirements change (again, and again).
Some will say that this has the drawback that you have to learn how to write the code. I will submit that HTML, CSS, and Javascript take less time to learn than you would spend fighting with the crud spat out by WYSIWYG tools, and once you've made that time investment, you have more power and flexibility than any code generating tool can provide.
IF you are building one-time only static web pages that will be posted and removed after a while and never looked at again, then by all means use something that makes it easy. If you are going to have to live with the results for a long time, doing it right to begin with pays off over time.
Caveat: I once spent two years during which one of my responsibilities was to maintain and enhance an extensive and very public website which had been 'designed' in DreamWeaver, using some of DW's design time templating capabilities. It took me a while to excise that cancer and heal the scars, but in the end we had a clean, maintainable site with complete fidelity to the original visual design and greatly reduced maintenance and development costs. This has left me with a particular distaste for that tool, so take what I say with that in mind. Also, I use emacs to write Perl code, so I may be skewed in general.
WALSTIB!
I agree.
Trying to apply for a job at Subway is an epic fail.
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