Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver? When I was learning to build websites in 2010 Dreamweaver was the go-to. I remember it thoroughly confused the heck out of me. Anyone here able to use it effectively? |
Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver? When I was learning to build websites in 2010 Dreamweaver was the go-to. I remember it thoroughly confused the heck out of me. Anyone here able to use it effectively? |
Dreamweaver solved no one's problems.
1) Regular users didn't need it: they couldn't use it for publishing their web-sites anyway. They quickly just switched to social media for publishing their content.
2) Dreamweaver was not a great tool for professionals too. Its code editor was not convenient and overall the program felt really poor in features. It never could catch up with new features of web. Besides, no one creates whole pages and Dreamweaver didn't support dividing a page into parts like header, main part, menu, articles footer etc, as far as I remember. This would be a way too much complicated task to implement.
So it was just a tool for students. If you were learning HTML, it was a fine tool to learn it. That's it. It was never used in real work.
The name "Dreamweaver" is really cool though, I must give them credit. It sounds even way too cool for such a simple program as it was. It should have been used for an iconic film or a video game instead.
Unexpected bottom line: do we need something like Dreamweaver which wouldn't suck? Yes. Figma got so successful because it allowed creating prototypes and was solving real life problems. Now a new program like Dreamweaver could solve the problem of quick prototyping and generating HTML code for something like React components.
Would it be a complicated app? Yes. Would it require a lot of programming? Yes. Would it immediately bring money? No. So currently it's probably won't be a good idea to work on it.
You can create something like a visual editor module for HTML pages or react components to be used in modern IDEs. Maybe even just by embedding a non-read only WebView with some cleverly butchered developer tools and sell that module to companies for a cheap subscription.
Does this mean I need to return all my paychecks from 2004 to 2007?
Consider that web browsers essentially do the reverse of HTML editors such as Dreamweaver. Moreover, all current web browsers do a much better job at rendering web pages from HTML than do WYSIWYG editors do at turning text into HTML.
I don't think many appreciate how sophisticated web browsers are these days. Now consider that browsers such as Firefox and Chromium are open source, their code could be used to develop HTML editors.
The question I keep asking is why aren't there a plethora of HTML editors out there that harness the algorithms these browsers already use for their own development.
As you suggest, producing a good HTML editor is very hard work, if it weren't then there'd be many good editors out there but there aren't. Take wordprocessors with a 'save as HTML' option and one will find the code they produde ranges from almost unusable to abominable.
Same goes for email editors that produce HTML-formatted emails. For example, Thunderbird has about the worst HTML editor around, it's brain-dead and full of bugs, and it's been like that for decades. It's as if those at Mozilla are terrified to touch it for fear that they'll kill it altogether.
Now keep in mind that Thunderbird actually uses the Firefox engine so what's going on here? With Thunderbird is the browser code completely divorced from its email editor?
OK, you may well say that's just how is it with Thunderbird, the editor evolved separately to its rendering engine. I'll then say take a good look at BlueGriffon which is quite an excellent HTML editor based on Firefox (despite the fact that it's awkward to use and hasn't been updated in ages). How come its developer can produce good HTML whereas Thunderbird's developers don't seem to have a clue?
Also, how relevant to this discussion is the fact that BlueGriffon's development has ceased: http://bluegriffon.org/. What's the actual reason for the developer ceasing development (there's likely more than he's stating on his webpage)?
Right, perhaps somewhere in all that comment lies the path to actual truth of the matter—that is, how difficult it is to actually make a decent HTML editor?
I've been on the lookout for a good open-source HTML editor for years and I've yet to see a decent discussion, analysis or exposé of the subject. Why not?
It's still impossible to sort out whether the demand for a decent HTML editor just isn't there or whether it's a too bigger project and not worth the effort.
I wish those who are truly in the know would put this matter to rest. Many of us who don't wish to delve deep into web browser/editor code would love some answers.
In 20+ years of employment I think I came across one developer who used it, and that was probably in 2005 or so!
Find it hard to imagine what kind of team would use it for development today.
Something that you can deploy as raw html/js/css on a domain/site you own and operate?
Something like Squarespace/wix etc but where you edit locally and own the content… (these and official WP afaik don’t allow this)
But I loved HomeSite.
https://nick.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/homesite-discontinued....
(P.S: I did use Dreamweaver in the early 2000s. It was great. I’m surprised it still is running! RIP Fireworks)
In a related not I still can't believe putting tags in ALL CAPS didn't win the style war.
More relevant to me though, I miss Fireworks so much. Nothing comes closer. Figma is great but web based and already shown willing to sell out everyone who trusts them.
My first real editor was Netscape Composer.
+ WinAmp
+ Custom XP skinz
+ Gamespy
+ Hamachi + Xbox Connect
+ Notepad++
+ Filezilla
+ Hosting sites on dot.tk or 000webhost for my Xbox clan
Call it muscle memory, I find it easier to cook a chart, shape and basic resize/crop on Flash.
a sales guy in a company where I worked long back, was making a quotation for it, or something like that.
update: i googled to check it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftQuad_Software
james clark is mentioned there as one of their notable employees.
Age check if you’re shuddering now.
I learn web on dreamweaver, I would make something on the front end WYSIWYG editor, and then "turn it around" (I called it in my head) and look at the "back of it" (I was a kid) - anyway, tables and frames and dhtml baby!!!!
Also: https://s.h4x.club/nOu445qL :) :)
I've noticed recently that the JavaScript debugger in Firefox can "un-Webpack" (and in some cases un-minify, if I've read the inputs and outputs correctly) the code behind many sites. It's certainly not as approachable as declarative HTML, but I suspect to some enterprising person, that route is still open.
Adobe still had GoLive at the time, which was basically what Dreamweaver is now, and it didn't mangle the output as much, neither did Netscape Composer (which was way more limited). Many of the simpler WYSIWYG editors (Netscape Composer, that thing AOL had, etc.) were not nearly as bad as FrontPage.
That's just sourcemaps I think. Pretty standard stuff, but the site have to provide the maps.
ps: Kevin Lynch got a nice career now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing)
Even better than steroids by step sometimes.
At a new job in 2003 one of my first tasks was to generate new “heat map” code since the company was updating the background image file for 50-state map interfaces. Dreamweaver had the best interface for doing that work, so I got a copy and spent a couple days carefully tracing the 50 state outlines (which Dreamweaver turned into geometric shape code).
But even then, most of our sites were running on a database-backed CMS. By 2010 we were building sites in Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla.
I knew folks still maintaining sites with Dreamweaver templates at that time, but they were all legacy sites in academic and government jobs. Most of those types of orgs at the time still thought a website was something you built once and used for decades, like a building.
Dreamweaver was how I learned MySQL back when I was 12-13 and got into web development. I don't remember how I came across it but somehow things, the way they were laid out at the time, made sense to me. This would ripple into a career that's making my living 16 years later.
I remember downloading XAMPP and installing it to get a local MySQL and PhpMyAdmin server. A few clicks in Dreamweaver later, I somehow had a connection file that would connect to my local MySQL server. I started playing around with it and creating different forms. The MySQL query generators on Dreamweaver were so simple that you could, with a few clicks, have a full on CRM.
I ended up coding a test score reporting system for my middle school class and the school somehow trusted me and started using it. This made me possibly the most hated person in the school because parents could now see their kids scores every day and there was no more "Oh the teacher hasn't given out the scores yet." But it was good times, and I was so excited about it.
Many years later, I now run a startup and have transitioned into using Node.js but MySQL is still my bread and butter. I still remember that day when I discovered the SELECT query.
The one that I really miss is Macromedia Fireworks.
The perfect mix between vector editor + html editor + OOP.
And to think that it did all of that in the metadata of a binary format (png).
Nothing has come close.
Fireworks could have been Figma, it could have been the default platform every designer used. But Adobe didn't understand it, they saw it as a weird Photoshop competitor and shelved it.
The last few versions bundled with CS were clearly neglected maintenance releases. I finally stopped using my slowing rotting copy in about 2014 when I got a Mac with a retina screen and fireworks was stuck with a terrible pixel doubled ui. :-(
I still haven't found an acceptable replacement, choosing instead to design in-browser with CSS. Of course this means I can't make graphic heavy designs that I can slice and export with transparent PNGs, but we haven't cycled back to that sort of design yet so I'll be OK with minimalist crap for a while.
It was a sad day for me when it got bought and integrated into Dreamweaver.
I used to make a non-insignificant amount of rasterised computer “art” using fireworks, its discontinuance (and the fact that photoshop was not at all a replacement) killed that for me.
And also to let another LLM create your Figma storyboards from your novel design ideas.
And asking a third LLM to give you some novel design ideas.
10 prompts to add a new feature.
20 prompts to add a second feature and fix everything that broke in the 1st feature while adding the second.
50 prompts to add a third feature and fix what broke in the 1st and 2nd features while adding the third.
In the damp bedroom where the doges lie,
One Prompt to rule them all, One prompt to find them,
One Prompt to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the damp bedroom where the black molds lie.
Edit: don't judge me I'm not a poet.
Have you found success with some models over others?
https://web.archive.org/web/20101007013748/http://panic.com/...
I had only used dreamweaver a small amount at highschool, but the imac we had at home had a Coda license on it. While I don't think I could comfortably use Dreamweaver to make something today, Coda is possibly usable. Coda 2 since came out which I never tried, and now it's a new editor called Nova, which I was using for a short while but has strayed away from the style-focused Coda 1.x.
I would like to see that class of "make your own website" desktop editors come back, that bridge the line between dreamweaver and IntelliJ. Just a few core IDE features that make it not a pain to use, and just a few GUI features to make designing easy.
I keep going back to Nova to see if it will recapture that magic, but it just can't compete with vscode these days
Early 2000s Adobe was stacked with web technology. They knew where the world was headed, but didn't quite capture it the right way.
Flash, Shockwave, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Homesite, Fireworks, Coldfusion, Adobe AIR, LiveMotion, Actionscript 3.0, MXML, Flex.
They shipped so much software, it's incredible.
Jeremy Allaire somehow flies under the radar as an impactful tech entrepreneur, but look at this resume: Allaire Corp, Macromedia, Brightcove, Circle.
[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/using/find-replace-text....
I coded up a simple CRUD in Streamlit yesterday (needed a simple way for my Field guys to create professional looking PDF trip reports) but it still took me longer than that workflow used to. Our tooling really seems far behind where it ought to be. The whole time I was writing it, I was thinking why did I stop using PHP for stuff like this?
It seems to me like that was a golden age of genuine personal computing that went by too fast and with many avenues left unexplored.
These days I know HTML/CSS pretty well, but do still use a DW-style tool to build simple websites without an IDE: Bootstrap Studio[0]. with a customizable barebones Bootstrap grid system under the hood. It's pretty powerful, GUI-based flexbox positioning, custom code support, split code/design view, SFTP upload built-in. I've used it to export an HTML design to flat files, and edit them in an IDE to hook it up to CMS logic, so there isn't any app lock-in or spaghetti code.
A new feature I really like is the "blog" function, where you can assign a folder to be the "blog", and the app will build an index page containing all those entries upon hitting "publish". The final export is all static HTML and CSS, so it's a way to upload to places like Amazon S3 and Neocities without the need for an underlying server-side blog platform.
https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/
Similarly, NVU and Amaya both went away --- is there anything up-to-date which will do web design interactively?
As a teenager I used to use a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, and it was cool but I eventually just learned HTML since I found that the stuff I wrote ended up being better than the stuff being generated by Dreamweaver, and of course that had the advantage of being legal and free. I'm sure that the HTML exporter has gotten a lot better since 2005, but I have moved as far away from web development as I could since then because web development is terrible.
A small part of me wants to try the latest Dreamweaver now but I don't have a Windows or Mac computer anymore.
With that tome on my desk it honestly didn't take much work to be able to do a better job than Dreamweaver using notepad and writing HTML by hand.
I never got into the advanced Dreamweaver features, am sure I remember loads of stuff around managing complete sites with it, etc. But from a purely front end developers perspective it always seemed superfluous.
But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.
Adobe sunsetted that project, but it still apparently somewhat lives on, in the form of Phoenix Code. (https://phcode.dev) And it still does look very “designed” in comparison to VSCode. I really like the default typography, tag highlighting, and some of the details of the text editor itself.
If I remember correctly, it was really the only way to go to make image maps when those were a thing.
Adobe will probably read this and sue me.
Then, I used a combination of Coda and BBEdit for a while. I remember writing the Sass.Mode for Coda, which was later taken over by Panic and included as part of Coda 2.[2]
Edit: Now I remember why the change. I moved to a Mac ecosystem from Windows in 2006.
By then, I had already moved on to Sublime Text around 2008/2009/2010. I don’t code much these days, but Sublime Text is still my go-to for its speed and the ability to open large codebases or an entire drive and let me edit things around.
Dreamweaver was a good dream. I’m going to spend the next 10-20 years learning Vim slowly and making it my retirement IDE.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/dmx-inc-files/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2012/coda-2-comes-built-in-with-sass-...
https://www.geoplugin.com/resources/classic-asp/#History_and...
I guess they worked out all the bugs!8-))
I moved away from it pretty quickly because I stopped using the visual designer in favour of HTML and also started writing PHP so as an IDE it wasn't ideal.
To be honest I'm kind of surprised anyone is still using it... There's a lot of great web WYSIWYG editors out there now and most websites people might want to build can be more quickly and more professionally be built on the back of services like Shopify.
I'd do anything to go back to those days building silly websites with Dreamweaver though. The web was so exciting back then. A lot of the content online really was just people sat there computer playing with Dreamweaver and working things out. You don't really get that anymore (apart from a few homemade blogs posts here).
For a long time, "UI design" was done in Adobe Photoshop, so using Adobe Dreamweaver to build out the final product and upload to SFTP was a perfectly serviceable workflow. Back then, websites were needed for a Google presence. Today you can have a business through a Facebook page, or pay to advertise on Google Maps or Yelp. Anything more complicated and you'd need a full SaaS ecommerce platform, not something that only does static HTML pages like DW.
Sure enough, she hacked on it for a while and was able to actually build a functioning heat map in Excel. I have no idea how it works. I've been a dev for 20+ years and that remains one of the more voodoo tech things I've seen!
They did it by embedding an Adobe Flash object in one cell of an Excel file, which self-executed when the Excel file was opened. Desktop Excel is insane.
So much yuck.
Frontpage could do FTP under ideal conditions.
> Finding a free web host with those extensions was near impossible.
Once upon a time I made a cgi version of the fpse protocol because Windows was so expensive to run, so it's a shame you didn't find it. The internet was smaller back then, but maybe not as small as I remember.
I implemented a few "webbot"s as cgi scripts instead of activex controls (like counter and search and even the 'Visual InterDev Navigation Bar' if you remember that). Dreamweaver never had anything like that - and cold fusion really was a bit further than most of my customers could handle on their own.
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-18859-1
<title FrontPage Configuration Information </title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- _vti_inf.html version 0.100>
<!--
This file contains important information used by the FrontPage client
(the FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor) to communicate with the
FrontPage server extensions installed on this web server.
The values below are automatically set by FrontPage at installation.
Normally, you do not need to modify these values, but in case
you do, the parameters are as follows:
'FPShtmlScriptUrl', 'FPAuthorScriptUrl', and 'FPAdminScriptUrl' specify
the relative urls for the scripts that FrontPage uses for remote
authoring. These values should not be changed.
'FPVersion' identifies the version of the FrontPage Server Extentions
installed, and should not be changed.
--><!-- FrontPage Configuration Information
FPVersion="4.0.2.2717"
FPShtmlScriptUrl="_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc"
FPAuthorScriptUrl="_vti_bin/_vti_aut/author.exe"
FPAdminScriptUrl="_vti_bin/_vti_adm/admin.exe"
-->
<p><!--webbot bot="PurpleText"
preview="This page is placed into the root directory of your FrontPage web when FrontPage is installed. It contains information used by the FrontPage client to communicate with the FrontPage server extentions installed on this web server. You should not delete this file."
--></p>
<h1>FrontPage Configuration Information</h1>
<p>In the HTML comments, this page contains configuration information
that the FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor need to communicate with
the FrontPage server extentions installed on this web server. In short,
do not delete this page.</p>
</body>
</html>You're right, considering that Dreamweaver is SaaS now. Were it a single purchase it would actually be more affordable for independent webmasters making websites as one could buy a single copy of Dreamweaver, make several websites, and host them on a single server with multiple domain names, while not paying the subscription over and over again.
Oh wow, I remember playing around with this editor sometime in the mid 2010s (post-Atom, I think, and pre-VSCode existence(?)/dominance).
Was that an Electron project too? Can't recall.
Friend of mine insisted it was the best for web development. I feel like I used it once and totally forgot about it until now.
I also recall that one mac specific editor that was popular at that time? Textmate maybe?
(I also seem to remember that Internet Explorer's Trident engine started as a fork from Word, although that's presumably a bit less direct in the later versions).
[1] At least proper desktop Win32 Outlook, not the dozens of other things Microsoft have called Outlook.
Can anyone explain how this is even possible? It's 2025.
Edit: clarification of bad writing
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567790.Creating_Killer_W...
grew out of.
Note the follow-up article: "The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It"
Nah, I would argue that was Microsoft Word's (Office?) Save as Web Page feature. Which is what I built my first few websites in as a kid haha before learning about FrontPage and pirating that (back in 2003). FrontPage was a dream in comparison. Then I learned that FrontPage was also not as good, and learnt Dreamweaver is the better option so pirated and tried to use that shortly after, but the WYSIWYG of FrontPage was leagues better to my little child brain. Ah, nostalgia :')
I remember, a bit over 20 years ago, designing a rather complex web app using Microsoft FrontPage – I used it to mock up all the HTML forms, which I then took screenshots of and showed them to the business analyst and got her to approve them.
Then I implemented the whole thing in PHP 4.x (I think PHP 5.0 had just come out around that time but we weren't using it yet.)
So I never really used the HTML of FrontPage, I just used it for what people use Figma for nowadays.
