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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

by 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.

by sgift 7y ago

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.