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why is/was dreamweaver bad, now? I got a tremendous amount of web stuff done many years ago. it all worked well and I couldn't have done it as quickly or well w

why is/was dreamweaver bad, now? I got a tremendous amount of web stuff done many years ago. it all worked well and I couldn't have done it as quickly or well without it...

ghaff 6y ago
I never used Dreamweaver but I did use Adobe GoLive for a time. As I recollect it was better than doing things by hand (or I wouldn't have used it) but it generated such complex and ugly HTML that you were effectively locked into the tool. The HTML was such a mess that doing hand patching was very hard.
arexxbifs 6y ago
It was generally considered bad because it (and other programs like it) often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead, spurious tags and what you might call "bloat". While there's certainly bloat today too it was a different experience on dialup, especially in the early days when you paid not only for the phone call but were also often charged a steep hourly rate by the ISP. There was also quite a bit of elitism and protectionism about it, because for a while a lot of people were actually more or less making a living from writing nothing but plain HTML. If anyone can make a web page, what good are HTML skills? Quickly, let's find something bad about it and save our jobs!
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I used Dreamweaver, back in the day. You could have it produce outstanding markup, but that meant spending a lot of quality time, playing with the templates.
  - drivingmenuts 6y ago
    I mostly used it for its preview capabilities and as a text editor, for which it worked pretty well, building my own templates by hand. If you actually knew HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS, it was a great tool for organizing the small bits and pieces of a web site. If you didn’t, things could get ugly pretty fast.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead, I just looked into the nightmarish tree of nested div's and span's (of which FrontPage and DreamWeaver are innocent) that's a Twitter feed. JFC, I don't want to ever have to scrape one.
Quarrelsome 6y ago
devs don't trust wizards until they understand their magic.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Dreamweaver enabled those horrible sites with sliced images in place of flowing hypertext.
ratww 6y ago
Dreamweaver was quite ok, actually. The issue was that it was limited, and it wasn't a good fit for every kind of website. Want to write documentation, or a personal website full of text and pictures? Maybe a simple text site for your restaurant or small business without much fluff? Then it's alright. Want to do a professional-looking site that looks like the ones you pay money for? Maybe look for something else, or at the very least start with a handcrafted template, instead of "faking it" with sliced images and javascript hover. The reaction against Dreamweaver was IMO understandable because there were definitely some people in the industry who were convinced that Dreamweaver was enough for anything.

why is/was dreamweaver bad, now? I got a tremendous amount of web stuff done many years ago. it all worked well and I couldn't have done it as quickly or well without it...

ghaff 6y ago

I never used Dreamweaver but I did use Adobe GoLive for a time. As I recollect it was better than doing things by hand (or I wouldn't have used it) but it generated such complex and ugly HTML that you were effectively locked into the tool. The HTML was such a mess that doing hand patching was very hard.

arexxbifs 6y ago

It was generally considered bad because it (and other programs like it) often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead, spurious tags and what you might call "bloat". While there's certainly bloat today too it was a different experience on dialup, especially in the early days when you paid not only for the phone call but were also often charged a steep hourly rate by the ISP. There was also quite a bit of elitism and protectionism about it, because for a while a lot of people were actually more or less making a living from writing nothing but plain HTML. If anyone can make a web page, what good are HTML skills? Quickly, let's find something bad about it and save our jobs!

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I used Dreamweaver, back in the day. You could have it produce outstanding markup, but that meant spending a lot of quality time, playing with the templates.
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  I mostly used it for its preview capabilities and as a text editor, for which it worked pretty well, building my own templates by hand. If you actually knew HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS, it was a great tool for organizing the small bits and pieces of a web site. If you didn’t, things could get ugly pretty fast.
rbanffy 6y ago
> often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead, I just looked into the nightmarish tree of nested div's and span's (of which FrontPage and DreamWeaver are innocent) that's a Twitter feed. JFC, I don't want to ever have to scrape one.

Quarrelsome 6y ago

devs don't trust wizards until they understand their magic.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Dreamweaver enabled those horrible sites with sliced images in place of flowing hypertext.

ratww 6y ago

Dreamweaver was quite ok, actually. The issue was that it was limited, and it wasn't a good fit for every kind of website. Want to write documentation, or a personal website full of text and pictures? Maybe a simple text site for your restaurant or small business without much fluff? Then it's alright. Want to do a professional-looking site that looks like the ones you pay money for? Maybe look for something else, or at the very least start with a handcrafted template, instead of "faking it" with sliced images and javascript hover. The reaction against Dreamweaver was IMO understandable because there were definitely some people in the industry who were convinced that Dreamweaver was enough for anything.