WSP: Dreamweaver Sucks
Submitted by kebernet on Thu, 07/12/2001 - 11:55
Tagged:
CNet has coverage of the latest crusade by the
Web Standards Project -- Authoring tools.
Anyone who has done web dev for any time at all
knows what horrible code tools like GoLive and
Dreamweaver produce. Now that Netscape and IE are
mostly standards compliant, they are focusing
their efforts on the tools. Good Luck! CNet Coverage
Comments
Re: WSP: Dreamweaver Sucks
yeah, we had a discussion at work today about what browsers we want to support. i was pissed to say the least, "what browsers", ridiculous, what about new browsers, other platfoms, etc. decide what STANDARD you are going to support and let the browsers keep up with you (YES, that sometime means leaving out a few features, using less javacrapscript, etc, so what, it works and will always work, whats really important that next flash intro or the real content?)
also, its funny you pick on dreamweaver, just today russ said "dreamweaver is like a chainsaw, in the hands of the right person in can make a beautiful work", I said "so what your saying is that an upright grizzly with a menacing expression is the best your gonna get, the worst is a mauled hunk of crap, i see now"
Re: WSP: Dreamweaver Sucks
Ah, but have you seen the affect of an amateur HTML'er trying to go old school and write code by hand? Here are the results:
Broken table structures
Incorrect or missing nesting structures
Lack of closing tags
Use of the blink tag (yikes!!!!!!!)
Oh, and don't forget that this great "hand-written" garbage takes 2 to 3 times longer to produce.
Case in point: a coworker here insists that Homesite, which is a glorified Notepad, is better because you actually work on the actual HTML and don't use a GUI interface.
I then open up his stuff in Dreamweaver and fix all of his broken table structures and nesting problems. When given a list of change requests, I pile through my half and then start on his half. But he still insists doing it by hand is better!
Dreamweaver does have its limitations. All tools do. It is a matter of knowing these limitations and correcting for them. Dreamweaver's strengths, however, are its speed of use. I used to do all my HTML in Notepad. But when I have to churn out almost 100 pages a day, writing by hand is impossible.
But hey, that's just my 2 cents.
Re: WSP: Dreamweaver Sucks
the problems you describe relate to your coworkers ineptitude, not the ineptitude of notepad. thats the point.
in fact i write quite a bit of HTML and XSLT by hand. I dont use notepad, I use emacs. And with emacs I can create templates that include table structures, etc, it does work, and all my tables are closed and then my code is validated at the w3c validator. How much of the code you produce will actually validate??? (even after 2 of you have worked on it.)
The problem is that people accept crap like dreamweaver. People writing crap by hand is no better, but its all still crap.
Also, if you are writing 100 pages of static stuff a day, then you have other problems (poor design of the site, need to utilize dynamic content, etc.) Now if you are creating 100 different websites a day, that each need their own structure, then yeah, you need dreamweaver to do that, but you are still creating 100 crappy sites a day and that should be avoided by modifying the workload and the staff.
Any way you cut it, yeah its faster, but its crap code as a result.