[thelist] Dreamweaver and hand-coding

Courtenay court3nay at gmail.com
Tue Mar 1 16:32:31 CST 2005


I agree with (most) all of the comments made and rely on DW
exclusively, and, am 100% hand-coder.

However, despite the numerous strong points, it is important to note
that Dreamweaver is a Buggy Piece of Junk (tm), and may requires
frequent reinstalls/deletion of user preferences/etc every few months.

It likes to inexplicably crash but won't tell you why, so you either
remove your user settings files, or do the whole reinstall.  After
four or five of these you get pretty good at it.

When you have many documents open and quit/re-enter, it re-opens them
all.. nice.. UNLESS it crashes, in which case, its all gone!  Great
feature, devastating when it crashes (if you're like me and have 80
million files open).

The FTP synchronize feature is a real time-saver!  Its like
diff/version control for the lazy.
Search all documents in site is great, as is regex searching.

However the program is unusable while up|downloading, which is annoying.

All that said, it is a great app.. when its not crashing :(


On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:14:00 -0500, BJ <bj at kickasswebdesign.com> wrote:
> "- Which Dreamweaver functions do you find most useful?
> -Where can I find these functions? (short answers, please)
> 
> - Which Dreamweaver functions should we avoid?
> - Do you have any tips and tricks for beginning hand-coders who want
> to use Dreamweaver?"
> 
> Dreamweaver's interface has a lot of shortcut buttons for adding images
> and tags (across the top of the doc window, and just above it.)  They
> add both the open and close tags and place the cursor in the middle
> ready for you to add content.  Title box is great. These save lots of
> time coding, especially when adding images, links, etc.  The property
> manager is also good for adding links and some other stuff, like lists.
> Highlight the code, then just type the url into the property manager
> "link" bar and hit enter.  Add a list by the click of a button.
> 
> There are also keyboard shortcuts.  control-shift-p for paragraph code
> comes immediately to mind.
> 
> The library function is great for making code snippets that you'll
> reuse.  Create the snippet, then insert it by placing the cursor there,
> and double clicking the snippet name on the lefthand menu.  Even if it's
> a whole block of code, it's automatically added for you.  I use this a
> WHOLE lot.
> 
> Validation is great, and the "clean up xhtml" thing that'll
> automatically reformat html 4.0 to be xhtml 1.0 trans, great when you're
> redesigning someone else's out of date code.
> 
> I use the template feature on every site for the pages that have a
> standard layout.  That way I can update the elements that are common to
> every page from within the template file, and it will automatically
> update the 60 or so pages that are tied to that template.
> 
> It's nice having that mini file manager on the left, I use that to open
> files, and it keeps things straight for me.
> 
> I use the text/css styles/manage styles dropdown all the time.  Though
> the basic stylesheet is done by hand, the editing and tweaking is done
> through this dropdown, usually while viewing splitscreen so I can see
> the changes happening-- it works for me, saves me time.  Though there is
> a caveat-- the dw wysiwyg rendering engine chokes on complicated css
> layouts, especially those that use floats in css.  Just because it looks
> awful in the dw wysiwyg window doesn't mean it doesn't work.  But
> previewing in firefox (my default) is easy- save, then F12.  Other
> browsers available through the dropdowns.
> 
> I use the rightclick menus on the filename tabs across the top of the
> work window.
> 
> I love using DW to edit CSS because it's all color coded, and if the
> color "aren't right" I know I screwed something up and approximately
> where-- usually something that would be otherwise harder to pinpoint,
> like a colon for a semicolon.
> 
> If you wish to make standards compliant sites I'd avoid the bloated DW
> "behaviors" like rollovers and such.  They're better handled in css.
> And most of the snippets that come as a package in the code library
> aren't xhtml/css, but earlier, so I don't use them, I add my own.
> 
> I never use the font thing in the property manager, since it writes old
> font tags.
> 
> I could probably come up with more, but this is turning into a tome
> rather than a short email *grin*.  Personally I can't imagine doing this
> without Dreamweaver.  Its advantages far outweigh its limitations.


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