{"id":48,"date":"2019-05-05T19:57:09","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T19:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/?p=48"},"modified":"2019-05-10T23:33:22","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T23:33:22","slug":"why-is-adobes-dreamweaver-so-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/2019\/05\/05\/why-is-adobes-dreamweaver-so-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Why does Adobe Dreamweaver suck so bad?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Credit: <\/strong>Pixelbay<\/strong><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I remember the good old days when I\u2019d jump on the computer and fire up Dreamweaver to either make a new web site or to make changes to a site already up. Those were the days when the web was new, back in the mid to late nineties. If you were around back then, you remember the days when you were cutting edge if you had a site, bonus if it actually worked. Points were lost if you just used an image map to create your site, or the worst was having some software build it for you, \u201csave as web page\u201d ugg! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were a lot of problems building a site back in the day, but over time, mostly because of large corporations getting into the mix, the web design process has become more domesticated. It was a something that nearly anyone could do if they really tried hard, now it\u2019s left to services like Squarespace or Wix and just a step above them is WordPress. This to me is just awful, not for using those services, but that there was a technical aspect to building a site. Just by having a site meant something to others, mainly that you were dedicated, and depending on what the site looked like, maybe talented too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were two ways to build a site back then. If you had a programming background, you could code it with something like c++. The problem was that the site built this way were awful to look at. If you were a right-brainer, then you went for a wysiwyg editor like Micorsoft\u2019s Frontpage, Macromedia\u2019s Dreamweaver, and lets not forget Adobe\u2019s GoLive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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LogoSave<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The war was on. Frontpage was basically considered your parents choice and suffered from corporate bloat everywhere. To upload a Frontpage site you had to install special files on the server to ensure that your site would work. Adobe\u2019s Golive was the second offering from Adobe. For some reason they just didn\u2019t get any traction or respect from designers back in the day. Then there was the much loved Macromedia Dreamweaver. Nearly everyone I knew used Dreamweaver and it usually showed in their sites. There was a sense that Macromedia was an outlier, based on the idea that they cared about helping people to build sites not about greed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the black day that I\u2019ll always remember as the beginning of the end came when I heard the announcement that Adobe had purchased Macromedia. I can\u2019t tell you how hard it was to take the news. There was talk that during the merging process that all the up and coming young talent wanted to switch over to the Macromedia division and all the business types wanted to head to the main offices at Adobe. It seemed so appropriate at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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LogoSave<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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LogoSave<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Okay, before I start on my rant, I want to make sure that I do give Adobe some respect for Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and InDesign. These programs are still very good, even if they seem to be slipping a little over the last few years. I absolutely love  \u2018content-aware\u2019 and swear I can\u2019t figure out how PS does it. I just watched a video on After Effects CC2019 that showed content-aware being used on videos. Too cool! So adobe does do some things right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My rant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was using Dreamweaver back in 1998 almost on a daily basis\nuntil about 2014. At that time I was pretty good at programming css and html\nand didn\u2019t really use Dreamweaver expect for basic previews. I also taught web\ndesign at a university and we used Dreamweaver for the first two classes. Mid-2014\nI went on a five year trip around Asia and put Dreamweaver behind me. When I\nneeded to update a site I coded it by hand and to help with my blog, I changed\nfrom a straight CMS to a WordPress site. So for about 5 years my interaction\nwith DW was almost nil. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s jump to today, or rather about two days ago when for a\nweek I was trying to create a new site with DW. Remember I used it for 18 years\nand even taught it, but the week working with it was painful. The interface is\njust awful, they\u2019ve switched, in an attempt to give access to some of the most\npopular features, to not allowing you to create the workspaces as you want. There\nmay be some special place that you can go to configure it perfectly, but I don\u2019t\nhave the commitment to jump through hoops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Get this, I edited something in my CSS in DW, and then changed my mind hit cmd+z to undo. Nothing happened, so I did it again and still nothing, then one more time still nothing. Eventually I gave up and went to the source code side and noticed that I was missing my last entries there. I guess for some reason DW was undoing the source code edits that I made while I was in the CSS. Just imagine how hard it was for me to fix. I couldn\u2019t remember exactly was the last three or four changes that I made were or exactly how many undos I actually did. In that instance, I was so angry and frustrated that I went to my browser and searched Duckduckgo.com for, \u201cwhy does dreamweaver suck ass?\u201d I was surprised to see a full page of people complaining about DW and how it has gone downhill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned I generally do most of my designing using code and although I didn\u2019t mention it before that for the most part coding is just easier in BBEdit. If you\u2019re not familiar with BBEdit it\u2019s just a simple code editor that gives you some help but doesn\u2019t seem to get in your way. I mention this because another one of my pet peeves with DW is that the highlighting of code is a mess. I literally can\u2019t see the cursor through the highlight and if I can\u2019t see the cursor I don\u2019t know where I am putting my edits. I went through the preferences trying to eliminate the highlighting feature but couldn\u2019t find it. Oh, there were lots of highlighting prefs that I could change, but I couldn\u2019t find the one that was annoying me. In the end I just tried to make due. The highlighting also has the worst tendency to highlight the entire line when I only want to add a comma, or remove a class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My typical layout for DW<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Another terrible thing that I have been dealing with today is that DW will not refresh the design window. So I add an image, and it doesn’t show. Think about it, DW’s only function is a what you see is what you get (wysiwyg) editor, but you make changes and nothing happens. It so sad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just searching the net looking for people complaining about DW will prove that I\u2019m not exaggerating that Adobe has dropped the ball so to speak on DW. They took a program that was much loved by designers and totally trashed it. Why? I\u2019m not sure. I tend to think that their insatiable goal of updating their software yearly requires that they make changes just to make changes. Who knows for sure, it could be that an up and coming wysiwyg web program has a feature and Adobe adds feels that it needs to add it into DW. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I get the feeling that Adobe is getting ready to discontinue DW. I\u2019ve seen some posts about it and it makes sense since it is almost unusable to all but the most dedicated users. I mean what can they do to fix it, start removing features? It seems logical to just create a new web building program and then discontinue the mess we know as DW.  I will still probably have to use it since I need to be able to teach it, but I will not endorse it or use it for my own sites. It just has turned out to be a turd of a program. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were a lot of problems building a site back in the day, but over time, mostly because of large corporations getting into the mix, the web design process has become more domesticated. It was a something that nearly anyone could do if they really tried hard, now it\u2019s left to services like Squarespace or Wix and just a step above them is Wordpress. This to me is just awful, not for using those services, but that there was a technical aspect to building a site. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[9,8,13,14,11,10,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennethcurtis.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}