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I loved Arachnophilia. Awesome little editor. Wasn't keen on Dreamweaver - I mean I guess it's ok if you're a designer but not really something I'd have ever re

I loved Arachnophilia. Awesome little editor. Wasn't keen on Dreamweaver - I mean I guess it's ok if you're a designer but not really something I'd have ever recommend for developers. Frontpage though; you're brave admitting to using that! My favourite of the failed web technologies was VRML. Back in the 90s I used to create epic 3D landscapes that would render inside the browser much like how some experiment with WebGL these days. But this was long before it was 3D accelerators were common inside PCs (they were still very expensive so most graphics cards software rendered 3D models). VRML I think was a victim of being too ahead of its time. The web was exciting back then. Nobody really knew what you could or couldn't do with it. These days I feel we've lost something with all these bloated frontend frameworks which act like magic boxes in that an alarming number of frontend developers don't understand how their code executes. But I guess that's what happens when science or technology becomes business.

coldtea 9y ago
>Wasn't keen on Dreamweaver - I mean I guess it's ok if you're a designer but not really something I'd have ever recommend for developers. Mostly because of cargo cult -- as Dreamweaver produced very clean HTML output.
- laumars 9y ago
  > Mostly because of cargo cult That was my point. If you're familiar enough with HTML to use Arachnophilia (which, if anyone isn't familiar with that particular editor, was basically just the Notepad++ of it's day) then Dreamweaver would just seem excessive. Hence why I'd recommend it for designers rather than developers ;) > as Dreamweaver produced very clean HTML output. Cleaner than Frontpage and most of the other design tools out then, sure. But my experience of Dreamweaver around that era was that it's HTML output still needed a lot of manual refactoring in a text editor afterwards. While it was better than most GUIs it was still a long way off "very clean HTML output". I'm sure things have improved significantly in the last 15/20 years though. But that was certainly the state of things back in the late 90s / early 00s. As an aside note: I won a Source Code Planet (anyone remember them?) competition one month with an entry I made in Dreamweaver. It was a mockup of a Window 95 or 98 (I forget which) desktop with functioning start menu. I always felt naughty for winning based on something I built in a tool that auto-generates a lot of the code for you but then other projects I released were a lot more credible (eg DirectX games) but far less popular. I guess it just goes to show how little most people cared for code quality even back then.
  - frik 9y ago
    I remember Planet Source Code, it was the Github of the late 1990s. Everything from VB, C++ and HTML samples were there. A one stop community platform. I remember I coded a Windows 98 shell replacement, a Frontpage WYSIWYG clone, an Paint clone, DirectX8 games in VB6. Then MSFT canceled VB7, me people moved elsewhere. Then Sourceforge took over. And later Google Code took over. Then Github took over.
    - type0 9y ago
      Sourceforge is not dead, it's just sleeping.
      - frik 9y ago
        Well, technically PSC (Planet Source Code) isn't dead either. There still new VB6/etc code gets uploaded even in 2017. https://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/BrowseCategoryOrSearchResults.asp?grpCategories=-1&optSort=DateDescending&txtMaxNumberOfEntriesPerPage=10&blnNewestCode=TRUE&blnResetAllVariables=TRUE&lngWId=1 https://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/BrowseCategory... GitHub is the current thing, PSC/Sourceforge/GoogleCode are still technically (at least read-only) around.
type0 9y ago
> Frontpage though; you're brave admitting to using that! FrontPage was a great educational tool, sure it produced crappy HTML, sure it was IE biased, but it made you learn, it was fast and came bundled in Office. Countless numbers of hobby web pages were build thanks to it.

coldtea 9y ago

>Wasn't keen on Dreamweaver - I mean I guess it's ok if you're a designer but not really something I'd have ever recommend for developers. Mostly because of cargo cult -- as Dreamweaver produced very clean HTML output.

laumars 9y ago
> Mostly because of cargo cult That was my point. If you're familiar enough with HTML to use Arachnophilia (which, if anyone isn't familiar with that particular editor, was basically just the Notepad++ of it's day) then Dreamweaver would just seem excessive. Hence why I'd recommend it for designers rather than developers ;) > as Dreamweaver produced very clean HTML output. Cleaner than Frontpage and most of the other design tools out then, sure. But my experience of Dreamweaver around that era was that it's HTML output still needed a lot of manual refactoring in a text editor afterwards. While it was better than most GUIs it was still a long way off "very clean HTML output". I'm sure things have improved significantly in the last 15/20 years though. But that was certainly the state of things back in the late 90s / early 00s. As an aside note: I won a Source Code Planet (anyone remember them?) competition one month with an entry I made in Dreamweaver. It was a mockup of a Window 95 or 98 (I forget which) desktop with functioning start menu. I always felt naughty for winning based on something I built in a tool that auto-generates a lot of the code for you but then other projects I released were a lot more credible (eg DirectX games) but far less popular. I guess it just goes to show how little most people cared for code quality even back then.
- frik 9y ago
  I remember Planet Source Code, it was the Github of the late 1990s. Everything from VB, C++ and HTML samples were there. A one stop community platform. I remember I coded a Windows 98 shell replacement, a Frontpage WYSIWYG clone, an Paint clone, DirectX8 games in VB6. Then MSFT canceled VB7, me people moved elsewhere. Then Sourceforge took over. And later Google Code took over. Then Github took over.
  - type0 9y ago
    Sourceforge is not dead, it's just sleeping.
    - frik 9y ago
      Well, technically PSC (Planet Source Code) isn't dead either. There still new VB6/etc code gets uploaded even in 2017. https://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/BrowseCategoryOrSearchResults.asp?grpCategories=-1&optSort=DateDescending&txtMaxNumberOfEntriesPerPage=10&blnNewestCode=TRUE&blnResetAllVariables=TRUE&lngWId=1 https://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/BrowseCategory... GitHub is the current thing, PSC/Sourceforge/GoogleCode are still technically (at least read-only) around.

type0 9y ago

> Frontpage though; you're brave admitting to using that! FrontPage was a great educational tool, sure it produced crappy HTML, sure it was IE biased, but it made you learn, it was fast and came bundled in Office. Countless numbers of hobby web pages were build thanks to it.