[thelist] Re: Dreamweaver and hand-coding

[Juha Suni]

> I would like some additional information about the possible DW-2004
> problems that Juha mentioned. I was going to describe the latest DW
> version in the course, but if there are serious problems with it I
> might change my mind.

Firstly I must state that my experience with DW MX 2004 is very limited, and
so it is very much possible that the things that irritate me might not
really be considerable issues, or could be avoided my setting some
preferences or applying updates. Also my opinions are of course biased from
years of use of DW 4 and DW non-2004 MX.

The first thing that struck me was that the actual program layout had been
changed from perfect to something less-perfect. The Site-window showing the
site files (which I consider the "main" window) had somehow been thrown
inside the main DW-window, and while editing pages it did not show up as its
own window in the taskbar. Therefore alt-tabbing between it and other open
files became impossible. Alt-tabbing between files, the site-view and
different programs (fireworks, explorer etc) is what I do _all_ the time,
and I felt utterly frustrated. I hope that there is a setting to make it
behave like it used to, and that I just didn't find it in my hurry back
then.

Other thing I noticed that IMO had changed to worse, was the way you edited
and applied CSS styles and DW behaviors. This might be largely since I had
gotten so used to the old way (and had no problems with it), that I just
couldn't find energy to start learning it in a new way. Somehow I just got a
feeling there that they had tried to make it somehow too simple for those
users who really dont know about HTML and CSS, making it harder for those of
us that do.

The third thing that has so far kept me from finding time to test it out
(apart from the fact that I really cant come up with many things that could
get considerably better from MX) is that on many forums I read people having
some technical problems with it, and that it really does not bring much new
compared to non-2004 MX. Even now, checking google for user-reviews and
considerations about if the upgrade from MX to MX2004 is worth it, the
general consensus seems to be "no". However, I'm pretty sure that this is
not due to the fact that MX2004 would generally be worse at all, rather that
it just doesn't really improve that much from MX. Im sure you can safely
recommend the latest version, just note that if they already have non-2004
MX at their use, they might perhaps just stick with it and wait for the next
major version before upgrading. DW 2004 MX seems to eat more resources than
MX anyway.

Here are few MX->MX2004 related discussions/reviews I quickly found on
google, that might elaborate on the differences:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum46/431.htm
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/mx-2004-macromedia

After doing some reading on these and other sites, I guess I might need to
reconsider my position too. Perhaps I will find some time to try the MX 2004
out soon. Most reviews seem to emphasize how the update enhanced the
CSS-support. Guess I cant miss that, just have to brush off my prejudices.

-- 
Suni