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Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweave

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

sgift 7y ago
Frontpage and Dreamweaver ... never before could you produce so much bad code in so little time. And never before did the person who had to clean it up to have any chance of breaking out of the box and change something hate you so much. Especially if said person was you six month later.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  Well, but if all you cared about was the design and not the code, then those tools were very useful. Sometimes i use Adobe PageMill (which is essentially a rich text editor ala WordPad that saves in HTML and has a sidebar with a file browser) to create very simple sites (e.g. [0]). I do not really care about what the code looks like since i'm not going to edit it by hand anyway (though FWIW i find it very readable). Many years ago i worked at a company where i had to edit PHP files edited in DreamWeaver by someone who had no idea about PHP, programming or even HTML (they'd design and write the text for the pages, i'd supply some code). The only issue i remember having was a couple of times making DreamWeaver unable to open the page, but that was fixed quickly. Honestly personally i'm a big fan of WYSIWYG applications and i really see it as a big step backwards how many things nowadays rely on (often several) preprocessing steps of codes like Markdown, RST or adhoc syntaxes. I understand that it is much simpler and easier to implement this way and i do it myself too, but i do not pretend that this is somehow easier for the end user or it has better usability (and especially grinds my gears when someone tries to convince me otherwise by using edge cases that only happen at 0.1% of the time, if at all, when actually writing/editing the content is what you'd do 99.9% of the time). [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/
- hinkley 7y ago
  My first job involved an element of hand-validating third party HTML and really, those two tools germinated a seed of hatred for generated code that grew and flourished unabated until the first time I looked at the output from an SCSS file. If not for Less and Sass, I might have gone to my retirement never having liked a single code generator. Because they all wrote the most atrociously wrongheaded code from perfectly reasonable user inputs. (By one definition, compilers generate machine code, but those did not fall under my umbrella definition of code generator)
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I always thought the failure of tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver was a reflection on the inadequacies of HTML/CSS/JavaScript as much as the tools themselves. If I want to typeset a book or magazine I'm not going to start by writing PostScript or PDF files in VIM. If I want to design a tool then Autocad is likely to be my starting point. Why should the web be any different, why do I need to learn some arcane text based language when all I want to do is adjust the margins on an image or include some data in a page. Sometimes I feel this industry is going backwards rather than forwards.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  Frontpage was awful, but I felt Dreamweaver did a pretty reasonable job generating markup. At least in comparison to FP, it was a radical improvement.
BigJono 7y ago
I mean, if you spent 20 years implementing nothing but static web pages and learning nothing then that prophecy would have come true by now, no? I don't see any jobs for just HTML and CSS anymore.
bitwize 7y ago
Good old GruntPage and Screamweaver. I miss the late 90s/early 2000s internet. As a web dev I cited the fact that I wrote HTML by hand as a competitive advantage -- my work loaded faster. In the days of dialup that was still a big deal. Today, web developers still don't write much of their own work; they delegate that to JavaScript frameworks and components.
rchaud 7y ago
Do you mean "developer" or "designer"? Dreamweaver wasn't a hobbyist's tool; it was priced like enterprise software, and had a ton of advanced functionality that really only web designers would have used. It's quite a bit different from paying $10/mo for Squarespace.
hinkley 7y ago
My dad found himself with a useless MBA in the 80's recession, so retrained as a programmer after I'd already decided that's what I wanted to be when I grew up (not the last time he would steal an idea from me and run with it). When I was in highschool the fervor over so-called 4th Generation Languages was kicking up and he worried the career might be going away. I wasn't that worried, and I can't recall entirely why I wasn't. Today I'd say that they will always need mechanics for the robots, but in fact the situation is not even that dire. AI, which I still believe will fail all over again, replaces less than half the code we write - it deals with the decision whether to do something, but not how to accomplish it. And we already know that we're fucking up data management pretty badly. If 40% of my job went away at the wave of a wand (nothing is ever that simple, and it takes a painfully long time to migrate to new systems), we'd have more time to invest in the provenance of data and protecting it once we have it. I'd still be overbooked and our customers would be a little less salty.
pier25 7y ago
Today there is stuff like Webflow which is quite successful. https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/

Reminds me of being warned, over 20 years ago, that the viability of my new career as a web developer was in doubt thanks to tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

sgift 7y ago

Frontpage and Dreamweaver ... never before could you produce so much bad code in so little time. And never before did the person who had to clean it up to have any chance of breaking out of the box and change something hate you so much. Especially if said person was you six month later.

badsectoracula 7y ago
Well, but if all you cared about was the design and not the code, then those tools were very useful. Sometimes i use Adobe PageMill (which is essentially a rich text editor ala WordPad that saves in HTML and has a sidebar with a file browser) to create very simple sites (e.g. [0]). I do not really care about what the code looks like since i'm not going to edit it by hand anyway (though FWIW i find it very readable). Many years ago i worked at a company where i had to edit PHP files edited in DreamWeaver by someone who had no idea about PHP, programming or even HTML (they'd design and write the text for the pages, i'd supply some code). The only issue i remember having was a couple of times making DreamWeaver unable to open the page, but that was fixed quickly. Honestly personally i'm a big fan of WYSIWYG applications and i really see it as a big step backwards how many things nowadays rely on (often several) preprocessing steps of codes like Markdown, RST or adhoc syntaxes. I understand that it is much simpler and easier to implement this way and i do it myself too, but i do not pretend that this is somehow easier for the end user or it has better usability (and especially grinds my gears when someone tries to convince me otherwise by using edge cases that only happen at 0.1% of the time, if at all, when actually writing/editing the content is what you'd do 99.9% of the time). [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/lila/
hinkley 7y ago
My first job involved an element of hand-validating third party HTML and really, those two tools germinated a seed of hatred for generated code that grew and flourished unabated until the first time I looked at the output from an SCSS file. If not for Less and Sass, I might have gone to my retirement never having liked a single code generator. Because they all wrote the most atrociously wrongheaded code from perfectly reasonable user inputs. (By one definition, compilers generate machine code, but those did not fall under my umbrella definition of code generator)
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I always thought the failure of tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver was a reflection on the inadequacies of HTML/CSS/JavaScript as much as the tools themselves. If I want to typeset a book or magazine I'm not going to start by writing PostScript or PDF files in VIM. If I want to design a tool then Autocad is likely to be my starting point. Why should the web be any different, why do I need to learn some arcane text based language when all I want to do is adjust the margins on an image or include some data in a page. Sometimes I feel this industry is going backwards rather than forwards.
chrisweekly 7y ago
Frontpage was awful, but I felt Dreamweaver did a pretty reasonable job generating markup. At least in comparison to FP, it was a radical improvement.

BigJono 7y ago

I mean, if you spent 20 years implementing nothing but static web pages and learning nothing then that prophecy would have come true by now, no? I don't see any jobs for just HTML and CSS anymore.

bitwize 7y ago

Good old GruntPage and Screamweaver. I miss the late 90s/early 2000s internet. As a web dev I cited the fact that I wrote HTML by hand as a competitive advantage -- my work loaded faster. In the days of dialup that was still a big deal. Today, web developers still don't write much of their own work; they delegate that to JavaScript frameworks and components.

rchaud 7y ago

Do you mean "developer" or "designer"? Dreamweaver wasn't a hobbyist's tool; it was priced like enterprise software, and had a ton of advanced functionality that really only web designers would have used. It's quite a bit different from paying $10/mo for Squarespace.

hinkley 7y ago

My dad found himself with a useless MBA in the 80's recession, so retrained as a programmer after I'd already decided that's what I wanted to be when I grew up (not the last time he would steal an idea from me and run with it). When I was in highschool the fervor over so-called 4th Generation Languages was kicking up and he worried the career might be going away. I wasn't that worried, and I can't recall entirely why I wasn't. Today I'd say that they will always need mechanics for the robots, but in fact the situation is not even that dire. AI, which I still believe will fail all over again, replaces less than half the code we write - it deals with the decision whether to do something, but not how to accomplish it. And we already know that we're fucking up data management pretty badly. If 40% of my job went away at the wave of a wand (nothing is ever that simple, and it takes a painfully long time to migrate to new systems), we'd have more time to invest in the provenance of data and protecting it once we have it. I'd still be overbooked and our customers would be a little less salty.

pier25 7y ago

Today there is stuff like Webflow which is quite successful. https://webflow.com/ https://webflow.com/