Dear Adobe: Please make Dreamweaver a Code Editor, and not a WYSWYG Editor
I know CS5 is coming out tomorrow, so by now Dreamweaver CS5 is probably already in the bag. But here’s some thoughts anyway…
I would like to see Dreamweaver become more of a code editor than trying to be a WYSWYG editor, and I think there are good reasons for this. Right now I’m a professional web & graphic designer (employed for in-house work, and doing freelance on the side). I was self employed for a couple years which I when I picked up web design/development out of recognizing the business opportunity for design work in the web. My story is likely one of hundreds that are very similar to it.
I had done graphic design as freelance/self-employment for almost 5 years, but never got into any code. Nevertheless, I had a strong desire because of the business and creative opportunity, so I picked up a great book (“Learning Web Design” by Jennifer Robbins) and learned HTML, followed by CSS. These skills have payed off dramatically in both business opportunity and creative fulfillment. (For me there is just some strange creative fulfillment about being able to work with code to build my design.)
Dreamweaver had certainly contributed to my learning curve, by providing a tool that I could use to learn markup, even when I didn’t know all the elements. Features such as auto-complete and the add styles dialogue box were invaluable to me in my early days of web development. If I didn’t know how to write a style rule, rather than having to look it up, I was able to simply open up that dialogue box. If I couldn’t remember the proper HTML tag, I just had to type the first letter and auto complete came to the rescue, while helping me learn.
Fast forward a year or so, after working with code almost on a daily basis – Dreamweaver is no longer my tool of choice. Notepad++ is on my Windows PC at my employer, and Espresso on my Mac at home. But why did I leave Dreamweaver? I’m interested in that answer too – especially with the upcoming prospect of either purchasing an upgrade to Adobe Design Premium CS5, or maybe just Design Standard CS5.
The main reason I don’t use Dreamweaver today, is that it’s just too bulky for what I need. Now that I’m past the learning stages of web development, WYSWYG features in a web design product are absolutely useless to me. In fact, even the Add (CSS) Styles dialogue box is out of date for my workflow, because a) I don’t like the code it generates very much, and b) It’s just easier and more natural for me to work with the native code in a text window now.
This is where it seems Dreamweaver is fundamentally flawed in it’s product nature. From my perspective, Adobe has tried to create a one-stop shop product for advanced web developers, intermediate developers/designers, beginner web designers, and even the graphic designer who’d like to occasionally produce a web site out of his Photoshop slices.
But a WYSIWYG editor is not the solution for many, if any, web developers and designers. It’s great for people that just do casual web updating or casual design. It’s even nice for clients that want to be able to update a site that has been professionally built for them. But a WYSIWYG based application is not where the people who primarily are responsible for building this stuff lives. I also don’t think it’s where these people are going (myself included).
Web standards, best practices for coding, and accessibility have all become such a high priority to the development community that designers/developers are no longer comfortable using things like table based layout or extraneous code, which WYSWYG tools tend to generate. Advanced developers are often most comfortable with a lightweight tool that allows them to simply code and upload files to the server. Tools like CODA, BBEdit, Esspresso, Notepad++, and others.
My suggestion is simply that Adobe either revamp Dreamweaver entirely as an application primarily built for people who make websites (as opposed to people who update them, or aspire to make websites), or else just release a new tool that is really just a code editor. I’m sure that last bit is going to come across as a jab at Dreamweaver, but it’s not. I’m just expressing that as a person who makes websites for a living, I’d rather have code editor than a WYSWYG website builder. Sure – DW proponents will argue, “what feature does any code editor have that Dreamweaver doesn’t?” And to which I will respond, “Exactly.”
