4 ms·

> It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," Yes! Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good to

> It's interesting to see people rediscover this idea of "develop locally, push static site to web," Yes! Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Being able to see what you're doing, without running like treacle in the browser whilst editing (I'm looking at you, Divi and other WP visual theme builders), is an awesome experience. Like professionals in many other fields expect from their software.

allendoerfer 4y ago
Many other fields do not have to edit turing complete results. Also you don’t need WYSIWYG but WYSIWTG, since you want to see what THEY will be getting, they being endless combinations of systems. I was there, too. Dreamweaver was not good enough.
- imdsm 4y ago
  Dreamweaver all too often spun nightmares
tailspin2019 4y ago
> Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Notepad.exe was good 19 years ago. Dreamweaver? Not so much. :)
- bilekas 4y ago
  Dreamweaver was a good idea, but impossible for them to maintain. In my experience it was regularly giving bad results. It was a great tool for learning HTML and CSS though, but mainly because you would always end up just going into the source to fix it and view in DW. I would be very nervous of anyone using it these days for anything else.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    I'm actually curious to see what Dreamweaver looks like these days, because I just recently found out that it's still around. I haven't seen it since like 2009 and I honestly thought it had been shut down.
    - marc_io 4y ago
      It's still around, but it's no longer being improved, just getting maintenance. Most of the people involved with it migrated elsewhere. Most who used Dreamweaver and relied on its extensions are now using another similar app called Wappler.
      - doodlesdev 4y ago
        For those that are into Bootstrap then Bootstrap Studio is also a good option which I found produces pretty decent results.
        rchaud 4y ago
        Yep, I'm a fan of Bootstrap Studio, if for nothing else than the fact that it's not a subscription product.
mysterydip 4y ago
I used dreamweaver when they had coldfusion integration. We ended up using the wysiwig just for verification because it would make the code so bloated (by late 90's standards). I recall using HotDog Professional for my personal stuff. Anyone else use it?
- rascul 4y ago
  I remember using HotDog pro back in the day. I don't remember much about it though, even how much I used it.
- mvuijlst 4y ago
  I remember being one of the first users of Hotdog. Sending heaps of bug reports and feature requests, and in the end even having the author over in Belgium to negotiate a European distribution deal.
- zerkten 4y ago
  Yup, I used HotDog Pro for a while and moved onto HomeSite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite) at some point.
moonchrome 4y ago
>Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago Good for what ? I remember designers trying to create pages with and the generated code was useless garbage once the customisation requests came in and they called in a dev
- zerkten 4y ago
  I would say Dreamweaver was OK, but it was eclipsed by the web-based CMS. Dreamweaver generated trash code when it was used as a DHTML design tool, but it was never as bad as FrontPage. When used in design-mode it would build up a model internally, and then try to generate code that it could later roundtrip. This worked when things were isolated, but as complexity grew it stopped working and was hard to debug. I saw it work reasonably well when someone took a code-first approach with the overall website templates which avoided the mess from building these up using DW's code generation. You could then set it up so people could only mess with the certain parts of the page which avoided the overall site getting messed up as you added others. This got cleaner when they introduced Contribute. Dreamweaver was created for a time when there was still a webmaster-type role in companies. These people didn't necessarily have what we'd consider a strong dev skillset, but the world around them had started to change which explains the range of capabilities in Dreamweaver. If you want to see some terrible server-side code generation, you should checkout Drumbeat (https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat).

allendoerfer 4y ago

Many other fields do not have to edit turing complete results. Also you don’t need WYSIWYG but WYSIWTG, since you want to see what THEY will be getting, they being endless combinations of systems. I was there, too. Dreamweaver was not good enough.

imdsm 4y ago
Dreamweaver all too often spun nightmares

tailspin2019 4y ago

> Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Notepad.exe was good 19 years ago. Dreamweaver? Not so much. :)

bilekas 4y ago
Dreamweaver was a good idea, but impossible for them to maintain. In my experience it was regularly giving bad results. It was a great tool for learning HTML and CSS though, but mainly because you would always end up just going into the source to fix it and view in DW. I would be very nervous of anyone using it these days for anything else.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I'm actually curious to see what Dreamweaver looks like these days, because I just recently found out that it's still around. I haven't seen it since like 2009 and I honestly thought it had been shut down.
  - marc_io 4y ago
    It's still around, but it's no longer being improved, just getting maintenance. Most of the people involved with it migrated elsewhere. Most who used Dreamweaver and relied on its extensions are now using another similar app called Wappler.
    - doodlesdev 4y ago
      For those that are into Bootstrap then Bootstrap Studio is also a good option which I found produces pretty decent results.
      - rchaud 4y ago
        Yep, I'm a fan of Bootstrap Studio, if for nothing else than the fact that it's not a subscription product.

mysterydip 4y ago

I used dreamweaver when they had coldfusion integration. We ended up using the wysiwig just for verification because it would make the code so bloated (by late 90's standards). I recall using HotDog Professional for my personal stuff. Anyone else use it?

rascul 4y ago
I remember using HotDog pro back in the day. I don't remember much about it though, even how much I used it.
mvuijlst 4y ago
I remember being one of the first users of Hotdog. Sending heaps of bug reports and feature requests, and in the end even having the author over in Belgium to negotiate a European distribution deal.
zerkten 4y ago
Yup, I used HotDog Pro for a while and moved onto HomeSite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite) at some point.

moonchrome 4y ago

>Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago Good for what ? I remember designers trying to create pages with and the generated code was useless garbage once the customisation requests came in and they called in a dev

zerkten 4y ago
I would say Dreamweaver was OK, but it was eclipsed by the web-based CMS. Dreamweaver generated trash code when it was used as a DHTML design tool, but it was never as bad as FrontPage. When used in design-mode it would build up a model internally, and then try to generate code that it could later roundtrip. This worked when things were isolated, but as complexity grew it stopped working and was hard to debug. I saw it work reasonably well when someone took a code-first approach with the overall website templates which avoided the mess from building these up using DW's code generation. You could then set it up so people could only mess with the certain parts of the page which avoided the overall site getting messed up as you added others. This got cleaner when they introduced Contribute. Dreamweaver was created for a time when there was still a webmaster-type role in companies. These people didn't necessarily have what we'd consider a strong dev skillset, but the world around them had started to change which explains the range of capabilities in Dreamweaver. If you want to see some terrible server-side code generation, you should checkout Drumbeat (https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat).