Comments on: Weaving CSS dreams

By: Tomas

Tomas — Sat, 06 Sep 2003 04:43:24 +0000

CSS positioning in DWMX design view is terrible. If you would be able to turn off CSS positioning in design view would be great. Besides that, I like DWMX and hope to find new useful features in new version.

By: olly

olly — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 00:39:15 +0000

I use DWMX and Topstyle on PC but am using HTML kit more and more. It and incredible tool covering pretty much everything you can think of and FREE for personal use http://www.chami.com/html-kit/.

By: Allen Pike

Allen Pike — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 22:07:16 +0000

I’m still using Dreamweaver 4 mostly because I couldn’t rationalize the expense to upgrade to MX if the WYSIWYG mode displays 80% of my pages as simply a php icon. I use it for prototyping designs, but since most of my content is full of mySQL data and if statements based on URLs, WYSIWYG will probably never catch up.

By: A. White

A. White — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 23:31:49 +0000

Dreamweaver is essential for me. I do spend a lot of time hand-coding, but generally after ‘sketching’ out the layout or structure with DW. It’s just so much faster that way. I really like its PHP support, which I don’t see duplicated anywhere else in the market. The CSS layout improvements are very welcome.

I use it regularly for Actionscript coding (on Windows when I can’t use BBedit =), it’s a great tool to have for Flash/web developers–all under one roof so to speak.

PS-congrats to StopDesign for getting the job w. Apple! You deserve it!

By: S Page

S Page — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 22:02:23 +0000

James and beto,
I think if someone uses a WYSIWYG editor and that they’re serious about web design, they’ll more often than not make the transition to hand-coding.

Dreamweaver’s split Design and Code View lets you do both at once. If DW had no other feature it would still be priceless. I wish DW would never let you hide the code view so people would always have to see the code they’re WYSIWYG-ing.

By: jharr

jharr — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 20:32:16 +0000

I’ve been using TopStyle on PC for over a year now and it’s a fantastic product. It’s the only coding/design tool I use on PC and most often it’s used to verify and validate. My design and code is typically done in BBedit on the Mac side. It has built-in multi-level CSS and XHTML validation, HTML Tidy, realtime visual style previews and a lot more. A great resource to have. It gives you just the tools you want, especially if you’re not a WYSIWYG fan. And it’s quite reasonable.

http://www.bradsoft.com

By: Jason Derifaj

Jason Derifaj — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 15:55:42 +0000

I’m like many of you — hand coding now. Once you make the move to CSS, you can’t use dreamweaverMX for design. (At least for me.)

I was seriously thinking about dropping Dreamweaver (which I only use to hand code now) and move to visual slick edit. I mean, if you’re gonna use a text editor, why not use the best?

Macromedia knows what’s good for them. They have to keep up with technology just like us. I think they realized they were on the verge of losing a few designers in the long run.

By: Ken Westin

Ken Westin — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 06:39:17 +0000

I think the one thing that really makes Macromedia stand out, especially the last few years is the fact that they really listen to the users of their products. Heh. Maybe Microsoft could learn a few things from them.

By: scottbp

scottbp — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:50:22 +0000

This latest release of DW is (hopefully) going to be very important to me. But not so much me using it, more all the CMs and PMs I have to deal with!
I am constantly trying to encourage them to learn exactly what well structured and standards compliant code is, and even if DW does put out what some of us call messy code (if used poorly), it is a necessary evil and I am always happy when they improve it. Especially since many people need to use something like DW in order to do any(much)html

By: scottbp

scottbp — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 02:46:25 +0000

This latest release of DW is (hopefully) going to be very important to me. But not so much me using it, more all the CMs and PMs I have to deal with!
I am constantly trying to encourage them to learn exactly what well structured and standards compliant code is, and even if DW does put out what some of us call messy code, it is a necessary evil and I am always happy when they improve it.
B

By: mitchell

mitchell — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 20:04:17 +0000

Speaking of hand-coding: Is it not kinda silly that one of the “great things” about xml/xhtml is it’s human readable/editable, but the majority(?) of web developers can’t?

By: gabby

gabby — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 18:27:52 +0000

When I viewed the preview presentation of MX 2004 last week, I was flabbergasted by the cross browser validation pull-down. I see it as an enormous backward step, encouraging users to focus on memorizing the impossible number of browser vagaries instead of learning modern standards (XHTML, CSS, etc.). From that pulldown, we’re a mere step away from using the Behaviors menu to sniff out browser specific pages.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 18:02:25 +0000

I applaud Macromedia for its continuing support for web standards. I hand code all my sites without fancy authoring tools, but I have to admit that my background is unusual. After 30+ years of programming experience, hand coding just comes naturally to me. My guess is that the hand coders will always be in the minority. Yes, it’s the “right” way to do it, and HTML and CSS are much simpler than the average computer language, but I just can’t see hand coding becoming widespread. The average person wants a WYSIWYG approach, and won’t settle for anything else. If we are going to progress toward a world of web standards, standards compliant WYSIWYG authoring tools will have to play a huge role in the process.

By: beto

beto — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:22:05 +0000

Although I’m from the old school of handcoding, I always liked the speed boost and control that Dreamweaver offered me. However, when I made the transition from tables to full CSS, DWMX just couldn’t deal with it. This, in turn, made me go back to the HomeSite/TopStyle combo, which isn’t nothing short of outstanding in its own right. However, I’m very impressed from what I’ve seen so far on the new DWMX’s product overview, and might make me switch again because of the speed benefits.

However, I couldn’t stress enough how important getting your hands dirty on raw code is for web developers. I cringe every time I’m get told of someone who knows how to use Dreamweaver but not how to code HTML, let alone CSS. And they call themselves web developers? Ideal as might be to pretend everyone were as interested and conscious about web standards and valid code as we are, reality is many simply don’t care. The new DWMX, at least, might make this fact a little more livable with.

By: lincoln

lincoln — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 17:11:40 +0000

The biggest problem I’ve had with Dreamweaver MX is its inability to display CSS layouts properly in design view.

One of the great great features used in Flash MX is ‘Live Preview’, which is used for Components. In the authoring tool, you can see on the stage how the component will look and take effect. One of my dreamweaver wishes (see link above) was that they would develop a “Live Preview” for CSS tools. They really should develop that out.

…Great write up, Doug!

By: brad

brad — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 15:40:33 +0000

The biggest problem I’ve had with Dreamweaver MX is its inability to display CSS layouts properly in design view.

Exactly. I hand-code in Dreamweaver and use TopStyle for CSS, but find editing text in Dreamweaver’s Design View to be exasperating because everything looks so screwy. If they’ve fixed that, I may upgrade. If not, I might go back to HomeSite.

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 14:30:18 +0000

The biggest problem I’ve had with Dreamweaver MX is its inability to display CSS layouts properly in design view. I prefer to handcode my CSS just like the rest of you, but it does me no good if DW’s renderer breaks the page so badly that I can’t edit the text without switching back to the code. Simply displaying the layout correctly would be a huge improvement, never mind the program’s ability to write CSS on its own. (And I know that displaying CSS layouts correctly is never simple, but MX is worse that NN4 in this regard.)

There’s a little-known page on the Macromedia site where you can send them your wish list for future versions. It’s a good way to get the engineers’ attention; I wish more people knew about it.

By: redux

redux — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 12:35:29 +0000

i for one hope that the DW ftp client gets a major overhaul. it always smacks me as badly inefficient when, for instance, i need to delete a huge directory on the server, and DW spends a few minutes going through each and every file contained in there (rather than sending a single “remove the directory and all its contents” command to the server). another feature i miss is the ability to set permissions on files/directories…i still end up having to use cuteFTP or something to make sure a directory has got r-w-x set the way i want/need.
but yeh…wait and see, eh ?

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 03:52:10 +0000

Does anyone else think it would be pretty useful if Macromedia just combined Dreamweaver and Fireworks? I mean, I know they’ve been trying to integrate their functionality for the last several years, the Studio thing and what not, but the work flow’s just not there. I personally wish you could edit an image, maybe add a little (tasteful, of course) drop shadow to your header or maybe change the kerning, and then, in the same program now, also edit the padding and border color of its container div, update some copy, hit Save and upload the whole page; new images, new HTML and all to the server? Anyone else agree? Am I just missing out on some huge bit of functionality that I’ve never discovered before or does everyone else have to update an image, save as .PNG, export as .GIF or .JPG, go to WS_FTP (or whatever), FTP the new image to it’s appropriate folder on the server and repeat as necessary? Why not just combine it all? Now, I realize it would take a huge leap in functionality (especially for the WYSIWYG interface) and I’m not sure how the code view would work if you could edit the images, but anyway …

By: Mike Steinbaugh

Mike Steinbaugh — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 01:23:01 +0000

Macromedia totally needs to be appluaded for supporting web standards. However, I agree that visual CSS editing will likely be flawed. I myself like hard-coding the CSS because I’m a layout perfectionist. However, if you’re not a code guru, Macromedia Studio MX 2004 does sound like the right tool for making a standards-compliant site that looks decent.