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The Danger of Dreamweaver (Part 2)

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The Danger of Dreamweaver (Part 2) Thursday morning, 11 May 2006

Welcome to the second part of my ‘Danger of Dreamweaver’ series in which I’ll be taking a look at the some of the reasons companies choose to use Dreamweaver as the web development tool of choice. In case you missed it, part 1 focussed on some of the problems a site can face when developed in Dreamweaver in the three primary front-end web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)

So, in the spirit of three, lets take some of the common advantages of cited:

It speeds up site production

How? Well reasons stated include:

• Design View
• FTP Integration
• Everyone Understands It
• Easy Data Integration

Larger agencies especially are all about effeciency, if something can be done faster/cheaper then that’s done. Dreamweaver promises to do everything for you, and it does, it just doesn’t do any of it very well. But ahh, you say, this is about effeciency, not about quality. As sadly true as that is I believe you can have both. Dreamweaver fails to deliver on effeciency for three primary reasons:

CSS

Basically, the CSS support still doesn’t it. Yes, it shows you the cascade, but there is no way to visually create it. There is no way to say something like ‘please make all links red, provided they have the class important and are in the div with the id linklist. Code wise that would look something like this:

div#linklist a.important {color: #F00;}

That’s not particularly hard or clever, but Dreamweaver can’t do it (well yes, you can do it, but only if you know CSS!). I’ve seen countless sites where a developer goes to add a class to something, hits the select box in Dreamweaver and is faced with a huge list of classes, each one individually written for every conceivable situation.

Basically, CSS is something that can only be used to it’s fullest extent if you understand the basics. Once you know how to use CSS effectively you can develop site styles faster and with smaller file sizes.

Small Websites

By the time you’ve set up a new site definition in Dreamweaver, I could have copied a basic template and be coding the CSS styles for that simple one page website. Dreamweaver is getting slower with each release and simply an overkill for a simple single page site. Which leads me nicely to the third point.

Large Websites

If Dreamweaver should excel anywhere, surely this is it? Well, no. The problems are many, on a really large site Dreamweaver’s already inelegant site panel will grind to a halt when you start up. FTP is especially dangerous with large sites, it’s very easy to start getting into versioning problems (hands up if this has never happened to you). You can get extensions for CVS, but not for SVN. But whether that’s handled internally or externally the site panel is never up to the job on large sites, and without using the site panel Dreamweaver doesn’t work properly.

Also, most large sites use databases and includes. Dreamweaver can handle includes quite well, provided they’e not dynamic, then again thats what the ‘live preview’ feature is for. Or you could just use a browser! So with the design view crippled Dreamweaver becomes little more than a slow, bloated code editor. And the visual tools for managing databases are so paltry they’re hardly worth the effort. Table joins, anyone?

It’s the Industry Standard

It may be the industry standard but it does not support other industry standards that well. Sure it can write valid XHTML. Sure it can write valid JavaScript the default javascript implementation is really bad and does not scale well. And once again it doesn’t save any time. You only need one good javascript function for doing image rollovers based on classes or ids, and that’s faster to plug in that managing each one individually. Better yet you could use CSS rollovers.

Coming back to CSS, it supports the industry standard, but unless you know how to use CSS it can’t write it very well. And if you know CSS well enough to write it then you won’t be as interested in the CSS design features. Especially not when there are plenty of free browser plugins that can give you the same information.

Cool Design Features

The latest feature of Dreamweaver includes guides and page zooming. How cool! Not to mention broken code folding (it lets you fold individual characters), built in validation (which is useless if you’re generating HTML dynamically). The problem with many of these things is this- when was the last time someone browsed your website in Dreamweaver? Probably never! It makes more sense to ignore what’s in Dreamweaver and check it on actual web browsers.

Admittedly, some of the features are useful, such as they way it shows the CSS box model on elements. But, it’s not enough, simple as that. Not enough to make up for the general low quality of code produced by the average ‘designer’ using Dreamweaver, and not enough to make up for the bloat-ware that Dreamweaver has turned into. I believe there is an opportunity for someone to make a product tailored to helping develop sites that really lets you manipulate CSS interactively and in smart way.

Conclusion

Dreamweaver speeds up development - sometimes. Other times it impedes the development of sites and leads to maintenance headaches further down the road. Once you want to do anything complicated you have to switch to the code view anyway. In the final part of this series i’m going to show how agencies can be just as efficient without Dreamweaver, save money and make better websites for their customers.

 

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