Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.
Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.
I never understood Dreamweaver. The first thing it asked me when making a new website was ... what the resolution of my user's screen is? I don't know that!
Its web development software from the 90s/00s, a period when websites were built by first having a designer meticulously mock everything up in Photoshop on a 640x480 canvas (maybe 800x600 or 1024x768 in later days), that mockup would then be handed over to a web developer (hi, that was me) who would take that mockup, slice it up into a billion little images, and then put them in a wildly complex set of nested HTML tables. The designer would then have a look over it and provide critique on the fact some element was 3px misaligned, or the font size was incorrect.
During this period I was berated by our studio lead for using new fangled technologies like CSS layout that could adapt to different sized screens instead of sticking to the trusty HTML soup Dreamweaver would spit out.
Don't worry, designers still complain about something being 3px off, or a font being weight 700 instead of 800.
What were these "troublesome parts"? The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.
There was a ton of... not exactly footguns, just things to keep in mind if you’ve wanted your site to work as you intended in all browsers. The webcompat nowadays is way better now.
That said, personally I’ve never understood Dreamweaver either. By the time I tried it, I’ve already got used to Notepad++ and writing HTML by hand, so I’ve just treated it as another text editor... and IIRC it just felt way more laggy than Notepad++, with a browser preview panel that took half of my 4:3 display. Maybe I’d discover some cool features if I’ve spent some more time in it? I dunno.
> The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.
A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct.
HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995:
Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.> HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML
Worse, it was an extended superset (ha!) of SGML. At least 20 years ago, SGML::Parser would reject some valid HTML documents.
That said, it was really easy to type correctly in a text editor (especially compared to actual SGML), particularly one that indented and matched tags for you.
Just like AI vibecoded websites... Good luck understanding the code when the AI bubble explodes and you can't afford the insane price that AI will have by then.