Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal! 318
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."
Good riddance. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Good riddance. (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?
Code Editor (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Adapt, don't die...and even MS has the solution (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Adapt, don't die...and even MS has the solution (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't matter. The most you'll ever need to do is recycle the application pool, and users won't even notice when you do aside for a slight lag if you don't have a load balancer.
Right tool for the right job (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Long live Drupal? (Score:1, Informative)
What's with the Dreamweaver hate? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:3, Informative)
Try using Django. kthxbai
To be fair, that's more MTV [djangoproject.com]. It still rocks, though.
Re:Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers (Score:4, Informative)
The other thing is that Wordpress etc either are or could be standards compliant. When was the last time Dreamweaver gave you standards compliant code (Actually, as a slashdot user, you probably never used Dreamweaver. I did once (for school, mandatory, but they taught us HTML too.).)?
Re:No design needed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Content Management System is not a design progr (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Dreamweaver & Standards Compliance (Score:5, 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.
While we're on the topic... why Photoshop? (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Re:Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers (Score:3, Informative)
I used to use DW (MX from '00-- small company, wouldn't spring for the upgrade) at work, and never touched the WYSIWYG view. The biggest advantage I've seen to DW is that it has a very good pre-generated template language. It allows you to do the sort of template-based sites with reusable snippets that you'd normally use (CMS/PHP/CGI/etc.) for, but allows you to generate them into static HTML files that require no special server-side technology to operate.
Re:Not really arguing, but... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Actually, the author seems to think that very idea of creating pages dynamically is a Web 2.0 concept:
In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today's sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
Somebody should tell him that all of today's sites are already dynamically-generated, and that CGI is a Web 1.0 concept.
Re:Dreamweaver vs Vim (Score:3, Informative)
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.