When I first obtained Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium, I was in a state of intense excitement. This was mostly in reference to the fact that I was finally going to be obtaining Photoshop and Illustrator, an image of Mecca to someone who had been working with GIMP for almost four years. GIMP’s a phenomenal program, and well-worth downloading for anyone who doesn’t have the money or career interest to get hold of PS, but there’s also no question that it has its pitfalls (the gradient tool, for instance, is quite weak in comparison to PS’s) and I was very glad to be getting better tools in the photo editing and vector department. However, I was also pleased to realize that this suite came with Adobe Dreamweaver, which I had heard mentioned more than once as being a very powerful coding tool.
I didn’t really know much about Dreamweaver when I began using it, and I’m quite sure I’m still not aware of the full extent of its capabilities. I remember being extremely excited by the tag completion feature and the ability to write my CSS in a GUI manner rather than doing it by hand. I will say that the CSS graphical interface on Dreamweaver was definitely responsible for improving my awareness of how to use many of CSS’s key element properties, and it certainly smoothed some of my early road into a deeper understanding of the language.
However, the more I’ve used it, the more I’ve also come to realize its weaknesses. The CSS utilities are limited in what they allow you to do, and while the code they produce is generally standards compliant, depending on it stagnates you, which is extremely dangerous in this field in general and especially during this period, where CSS3 and HTML5 are beginning to poke their heads out and turn the markup and styling arena entirely upside-down. When I realized the limitations of the CSS functions and realized that there were plenty of text-based editors out there which also had the tag completion feature, my opinion of Dreamweaver soured somewhat. The more I learn about it, the more I have come to identify it, generally, as an extremely expensive (and, in its defense, much-better-than-average) WYSIWYG editor.
My movement away from Dreamweaver was complete when I began suffering issues with my RAM; I constantly had too many programs open for my laptop and so downloaded a text editor called Smultron (an excellent — and free — simple editor for Mac which is unfortunately no longer being updated that I can tell) because Dreamweaver set my fans roaring, often froze, and generally was providing more trouble than it was worth during this period.
The more I used Smultron, the more I came to realize that there was nothing that I wanted to do with it that would have required Dreamweaver to actually complete; as a matter of fact, it was a somewhat freeing experience. I began to investigate further into the CSS properties that were available rather than trusting to Dreamweaver’s system, and began to work at a more markup-before-styling process, and in general I just found that there was really no reason for me to go *back* to Dreamweaver, having left it. The one remaining potential attraction that it held was the close connection between the file editing and the FTP connection, but there are other text programs that do that as well (I fell in love with the demo version of Coda but haven’t yet been able to afford the full version) and in the meantime, Cyberduck (another excellent Mac freeware program) does the job just fine.
I’d be interested to hear feedback from other designers on their experience with Dreamweaver — I’m sure there are elements of its usefulness I am missing. If you have any thoughts on this — or on recommendations for good web development editors — I’d love to hear them, so leave a comment! I’d like to take the time to compile a list of recommended ones, if I can hear from enough people.