[thelist] RE: CFMX / Dreamweaver MX

[Judah McAuley]

Sam Richardson wrote:
> I doubt the list of features for either piece of software comes close to
> what Dreamweaver offers.
>
> I'm sick of people slagging off Dreamweaver and other visual based editors
> for text based ones. Sure in the wrong hands the code Dreamweaver produces
> is bad, but thats the same with any tool. But for things like complex nested
> table editing and images I doubt you can get close to the speed of a visual
> editor.

Actually, complex nested tables is why I hate dreamweaver (v. 4 on back
and all other wysinwyg editors).  It's very rare that you actually need
complex nested tables.  And if you do need complex nested tables, you
probably need to rethink your design because its going to be slow and
buggy.  Nonetheless, if you use Dreamweaver in its visual mode, it
encourages complex, bulky designs with redundant code (most of it in
tables and font tags).  You may be able to write code faster in
Dreamweaver, but I bet I can write faster code in CF Studio.

That being said, I have been beta testing DW MX and it's adopted a
number of nice features from CF Studio/Homesite.  I've still got some
learning to do and there are some things I'm not so happy about, but
over all, it appears to have done a quite credible job of stradling the
fence between visual design and code design.  Not at all an easy task.
DW MX is a complex tool.  It will take awhile before I appreciate the
new things that it will allow me to do that CF Studio did not allow.
Whether it will make me an overall more efficient program or not remains
to be seen, but I can say people have slagged previous versions of
Dreamweaver for a very good reason:  they encouraged crappy code and
they were difficult for good hand coders to use.  Hopefully this release
will finally get visual editors over the hump and to the point where
they can happily live on the desktop of "coders" as well as "designers".

Judah