What is so wrong with Dreamweaver?

Get Started
1

Hello folks, I’m new here (go easy on me!)

I’m a beginner to all of this stuff and primarily view myself as a designer who understands the importance of hand-coding. I notice that a lot of people prefer texteditors like Coda, Textmate, etc. over Dreamweaver.

Why is this?

I only use Dreamweaver as a hand-coding environment and always abstain from using its WYSIWYG features. I would think that surely Dreamweaver beats the competition when it comes to FTP and file handling stuff.

let me hear your opinions, thanks!

2

The primary reason for dislike is the WYSIWYG code which gets generated.

3

Why is this?

Because many people do NOT like hand-coding and don’t mind generated garbage, so long as it’s either valid-enough for them or whatever.

Also, the tools you listed often have other features some find useful, so they may well hand-code but use stuff like code-completion, ftp (gawd dreambeaver’s ftp is known for security holes, unless those have been fixed recently), code folding, whatever.

I would think that surely Dreamweaver beats the competition when it comes to FTP and file handling stuff.

Try sshfs. It’s teh jawsome!

Some people may be used to working in an IDE for other stuff and so keep using it for simpler text editing as well.

Beyond that, there’s no real special reason people like those tools. Tools is tools.

4

To me, it’s only good for a few things…such as:

  • Changing links site-wide
  • Find and replace things throughout whole folders/sites
  • Live view while messing with CSS positioning/layout/styles
  • Messing with image maps (which I rarely do, these days, unless I’m making an ad or a Facebook custom page/header)

Sometimes if I am doing a complicated layout or design, I’ll need to have it up, but I’ll also use Firebug/IE Developer Toolbar or Chrome element inspection to mess with code while viewing a design.

Other than that, I rarely use it. But I’ve gotta buy a copy of it and upgrade it once in awhile, just to do the above.

5

Thing this is, for hand-coding, DW really is not better than the competition. In fact with both DW (CS5) and Coda on my computers I don’t even open DW and do everything with Coda. The File management is just plain better.