[thelist] Frontpage verses Dreamweaver

[VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK]

> At the risk of feeding into what may be becoming a holy war, It
> messes up my carefully indented HTML tags, for one.  Of course,
> if I stayed in WYSIWYG, I would never notice.

Well here are 10 reasons why DW sucks -imho. I don't say that it sucks
for everyone else, since it is """accepted""" as a standard by a
majority of users.

one - indentation - yes this is the most annoying one, I don't want my
indentation look like a chainsaw.

second, it add its dw_xxx scripts even if I do not want.

three, it opens and closes DB connections whenever I put a dynamic
widget in the page. ideally the connection should be opened on the top
of the page, and closed at the bottom (however this was around v3 of
DW, I don't know if it still aplies)

four, it has localization issues, the desing view does not fully
support CP-1254 (I found a patch for it but it did not work, may be it
has been fixed now)

five, dreamweaver comes with built in fireworks, which, one may say,
kicks major ass. However it has localization problems either.

six, people say that it is slow on OSX (I do not have one, thus I have
not tested)

seven, CSS based design render awful in design view - they have fixed
it a little but it's still bad.  How something that is somewhat of a
de facto standard in web design it can't even render CSS properly ?!

eight, it sometimes (seldom) shuts itself down.

nine, when pasting text which inclues quotes and special characters,
it says that there are invalid charecters in the current character
set.

and the last but not the least to mention the template feature is
buggy. It tells me that I've made changes to uneditable regions and
then all my changes are not saved.


* * * 

The lager issue here is the long term trend of using bloated
Macromedia products. If you're going to tie your website designs to MM
templates and Contribute connections you're going to experience more
and more problems.

imho, MM guys are adding too many features to it, which makes the
codebase unmanagable.

Each release of DW is more bloated and tries to do far more than a web
editor is supposed to do (I have the same thoughts about homesite as
well - which will not have newer version anyways :) ).

CSS is a complicated issue, despite the (apparent) simplicity of its
components. Producing a rendering engine that works flawlessly has  to
be achieved by a browser manufacturer.

* * *

Well, I do not want to begin a war that has been discussed a zillion
of times a priori. These are my "humble" and "personal" thoughts. Just
used my right to reply.

Everyone is free to think as they like. I repeat, DW being not my
favorite program does not mean that it is to suck for anyone else.

Cheers,
Volkan