[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
___________________________________________________________________
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?
Author : gillytech
Score : 98 points
Date : 2025-02-22 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Dreamweaver confused? It was a drag & drop & point & click web
| builder; what was confusing about it? There are many similar
| tools now, free and paid, haven't heard about Dreamweaver in a
| long while, so while I don't understand the confusing part, I am
| very curious if anyone is using it still. I do see it is still
| sold (and maintained?).
| jbs789 wrote:
| This is a question. What is your real question? Are you looking
| to build something now?
| throwaway127482 wrote:
| Ever heard of curiosity?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Nobody uses it to build anything professional, it's a cute toy
| jon-wood wrote:
| I would hope nobody is using it for anything professional now
| but it was definitely used back in the day, my first
| professional development job was for a small agency which used
| Dreamweaver for everything. I'm not saying that was a good
| thing, it generated some of the worst code I've ever seen, but
| it was used.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| It is always funny to see "professional" code or tools compared
| with "toys". In reality, it is precisely the "professional",
| "enterprise" stuff that turns out to be a giant pile of shit
| (which we rarely get to see from outside). There are
| professional businesses storing their main database in Excel,
| while the amateurs obsess over whether Postgres is scalable
| enough.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Real professionals use MongoDB because it is web scale.
| pacifika wrote:
| I think I used it to build an ie5 for Macintosh compatible
| Sharepoint theme.
|
| Age check if you're shuddering now.
| bdcravens wrote:
| While you are correct that few are using it to build
| "professional" sites, it was never really a toy. Pretty
| powerful for the time, and even let you integrate with a number
| of backend technologies, database servers, etc. For today's
| world, where you need 3000 Javascript packages to display
| "Hello World", it's not a good fit.
| babuloseo wrote:
| I still cant believe what Adobe did with Flash.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What were they supppise to do with Flash?
| blargthorwars wrote:
| Make the Flash plugin not suck, and provide Javascript
| rendering for HTML clients that couldn't install it.
| ssag2 wrote:
| I used it yesterday to plot out a deck I'm building. The
| ability to draw easily, snap to grid, custom rulers, makes it
| a great design tool. Better than Corel Draw anyway.
| aradox66 wrote:
| I miss flash
| Apreche wrote:
| Really, it's more about what Apple did with Flash. iOS not
| supporting it is what killed it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Flash being a persistent security hole and memory hog is what
| killed it. Adobe should have gotten their shit together.
| Apple saved us from the hell of fixed resolution flash apps
| and dozens of flash ads on a page.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Steve Jobs talked about this- when asked by the audience
| why he wasn't supporting Flash, he said the main thing
| people will be missing out on is banner ads. And he was
| mostly right.
| UltraSane wrote:
| You should have seen what VMware did with Flash when they
| moronically rewrote vCenter client in it. Worst software ever.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| There must be a successor, right?
| Bayart wrote:
| Webflow ? Squarespace ? I assumed that segment had been
| occupied by CMS and SaaS companies.
| rafram wrote:
| Absolutely Squarespace (and WordPress). Non-technical website
| maintainers don't want an HTML editor; they want their
| website to have an edit button.
| mentos wrote:
| I tried out Webflow this past week was a pretty enjoyable
| experience took me back to Dreamweaver days a bit.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I doubt it's worth it since you can get the same results in a
| few hours with Tailwind.
| mattront wrote:
| Pinegrow Web Editor [0] (I'm the author) gets a lot of ex-
| Dreamweaver users who are looking for a more modern
| alternative.
|
| [0] https://pinegrow.com
| 42lux wrote:
| I am volunteering in a school library and someone ,,built" their
| system with Dreamweaver and FileMaker. It's still in use on an
| airgapped winxp machine.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Notepad was even better than dreamweaver. Never touched it and
| was taught to stay away.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| People keep telling me to use Dreamweaver but I stick with what
| works: FrontPage 98
| smitelli wrote:
| Microsoft Word's "Save as Web Page" or GTFO.
| trinix912 wrote:
| That's ironically still the easiest way to go for HTML emails
| as the output is almost guaranteed to display well across
| various email clients that don't implement CSS properly
| (Outlook).
| fredoralive wrote:
| IIRC Outlook[1] just uses the Word engine internally, so
| it's going to share the same quirks.
|
| (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.
| riskneutral wrote:
| > email clients that don't implement CSS properly
| (Outlook).
|
| Can anyone explain how this is even possible? It's 2025.
| amlib wrote:
| Using view source in IE to discover how certain layouts and
| effects were done and trying to replicate it on Notepad...
| and then downloading Dreamweaver because you were a n00b and
| needed that WYSIWYG goodness.
| Terretta wrote:
| Kids these days. The last good vintage FrontPage was from
| Vermeer.
| kurthr wrote:
| Oh man, I'm gonna have to upgrade my AOLPress from 1.2.2 to
| 2.0!
| kxrm wrote:
| FrontPage Express was what I used to build my first website.
| (personal project with friends) I learned so much about HTML
| simply because of the limitations in FrontPage Express.
| viccis wrote:
| Same. I built a rockin Pokemon website with it when I was 9.
| riskneutral wrote:
| Awesome
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| That's nothing, you'll have to pry my Mac with System 8 and
| GoLive CyberStudio (winner of most 90s application name) from
| my cold, dead hands.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Anyone ever use Homestead around that era?
| lelandfe wrote:
| Haha ok grandpa! _tabs back to iWeb_
| cr125rider wrote:
| I was a kid the last time I touched front page. Why did my
| simple site need front page extensions on the server? It was
| basically a static site. Finding a free web host with those
| extensions was near impossible.
| neom wrote:
| I do!!!!!! I love dreamwaver even today, I'm surprised people
| don't use it, they have done an amazing job keeping it up to date
| - it's honestly a joy to use. Granted: I'm not a real dev/swe,
| just a dude who likes to mess around with webtech, still, I think
| "real devs" would enjoy it too, it's great to use.
|
| 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 :) :)
| don-code wrote:
| I did the same, except with Netscape Composer. That was a time
| where the output of the WYSIWYG editor - really, the source of
| any page - was pretty digestible, even to me as a middle school
| student.
|
| 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.
| trinix912 wrote:
| I think it was Microsoft FrontPage that had the most
| undigestible output at the time. A mess of tables, inline
| styles, Internet Explorer-specific tricks, plus a reliance on
| FrontPage Server Extensions for full functionality.
|
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| FrontPage is what I made my first sites on as a child. That
| was such a fun experience.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I forgot if FrontPage had the automatic FTP upload or if
| it's a fantasy in my mind.
| clintonb wrote:
| Dreamweaver had FTP uploads. Frontpage only uploaded to
| servers that supported their protocol.
| nativeit wrote:
| FrontPage was indeed terrible, it caused me to make an even
| worse decision in the 1990's---make websites almost
| entirely out of image maps, and then eventually that
| terrible idea evolved into the classic terrible approach to
| early '00's web frontends (bum bum bum): _Macromedia Flash_
| and Actionscript (the latter of which I actually remember
| fondly, although I may just be remembering it with rose-
| tinted glasses).
|
| Edit: clarification of bad writing
| throwup238 wrote:
| Oh man that reminds me of customizing people Neopets
| personal pages as kid. Image maps and tables everywhere.
| ambentzen wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's just sourcemaps I think. Pretty standard stuff, but
| the site have to provide the maps.
| agumonkey wrote:
| heh, late 90s war3z was larger than I thought.
|
| ps: Kevin Lynch got a nice career now
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Lynch_(computing)
| pupppet wrote:
| I stopped using it ages ago but I still use its HTML code colour
| scheme into whatever code editor I use, nothing else feels right.
| lewdwig wrote:
| I think the emerging meta seems to be using LLMs that will create
| HTML components for you from your Figma storyboards.
|
| 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.
| canadiantim wrote:
| Yep this does seem to be the emerging meta.
|
| Have you found success with some models over others?
| pockybum522 wrote:
| I'm not sure they were being serious.
| neither_color wrote:
| One prompt to generate 75% of what you want and get you excited
| and fill you with a sense of dread over what it means for
| future tech careers.
|
| 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.
| LaGrange wrote:
| One for the Dark Lord on his Dark Throne,
|
| 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.
| aruggirello wrote:
| You forgot a fourth LLM will be the one using the site.
| deadbabe wrote:
| And a fifth LLM created from training data scraped from the
| site.
| markx2 wrote:
| I probably tried to use a pirated version of Dreamweaver.
|
| But I loved HomeSite.
|
| https://nick.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/homesite-discontinued....
| bdcravens wrote:
| Homesite was the first editor I used extensively for web
| development (after trying some of the other options like HotDog
| Pro, etc). It was small enough, and simple enough, that you
| could run it directly from a 1.44mb floppy. (I was poor in
| college and relied on computer labs) Later went on to use
| Allaire's ColdFusion Studio, which was a superset of Homesite,
| for several years.
| Dachande663 wrote:
| I loved dreamweaver when starting out. Never got on with the
| WYSIWYG (hence moving on), but its ability to read your CSS file
| and suggest classes was great. MX was the pinnacle in early
| 2000s.
|
| 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.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Lunacy is just like Figma but local.
| zer0x4d wrote:
| An ode to Dreamweaver
|
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I loved the XAMPP logo
| evanmoran wrote:
| When Dreamweaver integrates GPT4o it will finally reach
| mainstream. I can imagine the podcast ad-spots already. Watch out
| SquareSpace. Disruption comes for us all.
|
| (P.S: I did use Dreamweaver in the early 2000s. It was great. I'm
| surprised it still is running! RIP Fireworks)
| teej wrote:
| Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
|
| 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.
| trinix912 wrote:
| What's even more interesting is when you look at some of those
| tools, many of them were actually way more straightforward to
| use to design websites without much coding than what we have
| today. Just like how we had all those CRUD rapid app
| development tools that would build the app for you just from a
| database model (Access, PowerBuilder, Delphi, FoxPro...). While
| what we have today is arguably way more powerful, we've lost
| some of that simplicity (at least for more trivial use cases)
| along the way.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Macromedia is really where to point most of that admiration
| IMO. Most of the products you list were developed there and
| then Adobe bought the company.
|
| Jeremy Allaire somehow flies under the radar as an impactful
| tech entrepreneur, but look at this resume: Allaire Corp,
| Macromedia, Brightcove, Circle.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Allaire
| perardi wrote:
| I can't imagine anyone is still using Dreamweaver--that market
| must have been utterly subsumed by Squarespace. If you are a,
| say, small business that needs a 3-5 page marketing site with
| contact info and about pages, surely it makes more sense to use
| Squarespace (or wix, or what have you).
|
| 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.
| trinix912 wrote:
| > I can't imagine anyone is still using Dreamweaver--that
| market must have been utterly subsumed by Squarespace. If you
| are a, say, small business that needs a 3-5 page marketing site
| with contact info and about pages, surely it makes more sense
| to use Squarespace (or wix, or what have you).
|
| 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| Does it? IMO it looks very outdated and cluttered compared to
| most editors. Clicking around a bit, this screen specifically
| stood out to me as lacking a lot of visual hierarchy:
| https://i.imgur.com/Y7iBS2p.png. It just kind of reads as a
| visual jumble with too many elements competing for your
| attention with slightly different/incoherent styling--I count 5
| different unique button styles on this page alone, with some
| buttons having flat borders, some buttons having shiny
| highlights, and 3 completely different shades of grey button
| borders. Definitely doesn't feel "designed" to me.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| No, no one is using it. It never was a go-to tool even back then.
| I feel old by just remembering it.
|
| 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.
| theseanz wrote:
| > It was never used in real work
|
| Does this mean I need to return all my paychecks from 2004 to
| 2007?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" 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."_
|
| 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
| expose 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| I heard recently during the big government purge that a lot of
| the actual mechanics of that purge functioned by revoking
| people's Dreamweaver licenses, and that a lot of .gov websites
| run on Dreamweaver. Probably the US government is singlehandedly
| keeping Dreamweaver alive through large annual contracts for new
| features. I don't have any concrete sources on this, it was just
| Twitter gossip, but it makes a lot of sense to me--Dreamweaver
| provides the ability for non-technical government employees to
| edit the site, low system requirements for the servers, and
| presumably enough Enterprise features to ensure template
| homogeneity across an org as large as USG.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Is it not included as part of the general Adobe subscriptions?
| bdcravens wrote:
| It is. https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html
| tombert wrote:
| I had no idea that you could even still get a copy of Dreamweaver
| anymore, but a quick search seems to confirm that, indeed, you
| can still get it.
|
| 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.
| ssag2 wrote:
| Macromedia didn't mind the piracy at the time. People learned
| from pirated versions and then went to work in companies that
| bought licenses. They bootstrapped the company with that
| tactic. Same with Flash.
| tombert wrote:
| Not trying to make the piracy seem "right" or anything, but I
| would like to point out that I didn't make any money with the
| pirated Macromedia software either. I made a couple cartoons
| that got blammed on Newgrounds, did the examples in the
| Animator's Survival Kit, and then decided I'm not smart
| enough to be creative and did software instead.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| This is pretty much my experience too, back then I had a copy
| of a 1000+ page book called HTML 4 The Complete Reference.
|
| 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.
| elviejo wrote:
| I like dreamweaver. But I could still code html by hand with
| HotDogPro.
|
| 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.
| zackangelo wrote:
| Allaire Homesite anyone?
|
| It was a sad day for me when it got bought and integrated into
| Dreamweaver.
| tuzemec wrote:
| Homesite was amazing. I consider it the first real text
| editor that I've ever used. And I hated Macromedia for
| killing it.
| samwillis wrote:
| If you hadn't post this comment, I would have.
|
| 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. :-(
| markdown wrote:
| I held on until 2020. At some point I had to give up MacOS
| updates to keep it going.
|
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| fireworks is still the best 2d graphics design system I've ever
| used.
|
| 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.
| gruntledfangler wrote:
| Spry assets
| graypegg wrote:
| Around the same time, I was using Coda actually!
|
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I always envied Coda users.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| Wow, I was taught Dreamweaver on a college course in the very
| early 2000s but I have never really seen it used professionally.
|
| 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.
| ssag2 wrote:
| I still use it when I have to update my website.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I had to read the question twice. Dreamweaver was the go-to in
| _2010_? I think it was already well on its decline by then.
|
| 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.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Funny story, I'm a SWE and my wife used to work as a marketing
| manager. Her boss wanted her to make something similar, a heat
| map over a U.S. map. Except he wanted it to work in Excel. She
| asked me about it and I told her I could code something like
| that, but no way inside Excel...
|
| 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!
| becquerel wrote:
| Excel is not merely Turing-complete, but a step above, able
| to achieve dark things best left unsaid.
| anakaine wrote:
| Set default zoom on the sheet to very small and map out
| states by cells - treat them like pixels.
|
| So much yuck.
| leptons wrote:
| I did this back in the early/mid 1990's. I wrote a program
| that could convert .gif files to Excel using the cells as
| pixels. I converted a pic of a supermodel and sent the
| excel file to my buddies. They were surprised to say the
| least.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yeah I used it at my first job in 2000 which was essentially a
| webmaster job my local college. But 2001 we were already moving
| away from it as we started to embed PHP here and there, and
| eventually start building full-blown apps inline into the
| website (replacing poorly integrated ColdFusion stuff developed
| in isolation by some other department back in the 90s).
| pentagrama wrote:
| My first websites around 98 I landed on something more obscure
| to build them I think, Net Objects Fusion. Later switched to
| (Macromedia) Dreamweaver.
| rchaud wrote:
| That depends on how people remember "decline". Blackberry was
| thought to be dead in 2009, 2 years after the iPhone, but that
| year BB sold more devices than ever.
|
| 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.
| rambambram wrote:
| I think about Dreamweaver once a year, last time I used it was
| around 2004, I guess. The WYSIWYG way of doing things was an eye
| opener after using Notepad and manually typing tables from some
| HTML book. I later switched to PHP, MySQL and CSS, but I miss
| ActionScript sometimes. I made some cool browser games with it
| and it sparked an interest for programming on top of designing
| (try making a car steer correctly in a topdown view when math and
| stuff is not your strongest point).
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. I have to run it under Wine on Linux, but my paid-for
| version of Dreamweaver 8 still works fine.
| netol wrote:
| My dad does. He prefers older versions though (and he switched
| from FrontPage)
| robotnikman wrote:
| Dreamweaver, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time, I
| remember using it in highschool to build websites during a web
| design class. I always thought it ended up being discontinued by
| Adobe and replaced by various web frameworks, but maybe I'm
| thinking of Microsoft Frontpage
| fakebizprez wrote:
| No, but I actually named my company's flagship software
| "Laneweaver" (logistics industry) as an homage to what once was a
| great product.
|
| Adobe will probably read this and sue me.
| ata_aman wrote:
| Weird quirk I inherited from Dreamweaver: I used a
| bootlegged/trial version in high school to learn coding and it
| would close itself every few minutes so I would Ctrl+S every few
| seconds to save my progress. I still do that to this day even
| though all my Jetbrains IDEs auto-save. I think I still have my
| webassist.com PHP extensions for Dreamweaver somewhere on my hard
| drive from 2008.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I got my (professional) start with it but very quickly grew out
| of it when I got a job working on real websites. But I do have
| fond memories of its editor. To this day I'm still confused how
| their built in scripts were supposed to work, especially their
| auth flow.
|
| My first real editor was Netscape Composer.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| I was using DreamWeaver in maybe 2006-2007. I hadn't thought
| about it in a long while. Back then we were CRUD web apps with a
| FileMaker backend and there was an integration where you could
| drag database fields straight out of FMP7 into DreamWeaver and it
| would automatically create the correct PHP (also 6 or 7 back
| then) code for your form.
|
| 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?
| jval43 wrote:
| Tools like FileMaker, Dreamweaver and others empowered regular
| people to do "personal computing" and allowed them to help
| themselves build the tools they needed.
|
| 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.
| radley wrote:
| I use it for FTP and (child) template editing for Wordpress
| sites.
| Jotalea wrote:
| I started making a website on Dreamweaver back in 2020 when I was
| just starting to learn programming. I think the website is still
| up: http://acunia.com.ar/leon
| WillAdams wrote:
| Don't look at me, I'm still bummed that Navipress (which later
| became AOLpress) didn't survive --- though a certain Tim Berners-
| Lee did use it to write a book about the web:
|
| 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?
| nabaraz wrote:
| Not dreamweaver, But I use Flash (Macromedia) on Windows and
| Adobe on Mac frequently.
|
| Call it muscle memory, I find it easier to cook a chart, shape
| and basic resize/crop on Flash.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| I am still on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HoTMetaL
| nwh5jg56df wrote:
| Cursor is the new Dreamweaver
| BinaryMachine wrote:
| Not me, I wish I could take back my college $ on courses that
| used extensive Dreamweaver and Flash. I guess we can't predict
| the future.
| graiz wrote:
| What a strange post. Anyone using Frontpage or Mosaic?
| wonger_ wrote:
| I have a friend that's been using Dreamweaver for decades. He
| still maintains a handful of client sites with it.
| nepger21 wrote:
| This brings back memory. Definitely a go-to at that time and
| nothing better. A different era.
| rchaud wrote:
| The last time I used Dreamweaver was in 2009 when I was putting
| together a site at a small business, my first job after college
| in a recession-hit market.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://bootstrapstudio.io/
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| I remember unmessing webpage layout from the dreamweaver
| generated html by hand so it could be templated for the actual
| website on my first job. Never again!
| superfunny wrote:
| Dreamweaver? Who remembers Drumbeat 2000?
| fuzztester wrote:
| I vaguely remember HoTMetaL Pro or something like that, by,
| maybe, SoftQuad?
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer)
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| I remember feeling like a power user upgrading from Frontpage 98
| to Dreamweaver and being able to hot swap between code and the
| live view. Dreamweaver rolled a ton of then-groundbreaking
| features into a great interface.
| TECHBEAST2k wrote:
| I actually still use DW when I want to convert a giant
| spreadsheet into a table easily.
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