My 0.02 on Dreamweaver
HTML Editors
Jeff Williamson
Northern Virginia Community College
www.nvcc.edu/home/nvwillj/ html-editors/
nvwillj@nvcc.edu
My 0.02 on Dreamweaver
I can't say that Dreamweaver is my favorite editor; it doesn't seem to be a polished product yet (example: Alt-F is both the hotkey for the File menu and the Format menu). It is a system-crashing memory hog (so's FrontPage), and it has some odd tendencies, like the inability to paste in code with tildes (it converts ~ to %7E). After a year of Dreamweaver use, I still prefer the more straightforward freeware AOLPress for smaller projects (Disclaimer 1: I learned this one first. Disclaimer 2: Nobody uses AOLPress).
However I'm sticking with Dreamweaver for big projects. You have to have something to manage code and write level-4 stuff for you, and I much prefer Dreamweaver's Library (basically just virtual includes inserted by the program into your code) to FrontPage's virtual includes or headers and footers. DW also has appropriate 4-level formatting features.
DW's WYSIWYG display is often odd, which is not a huge problem. DW's poor code-view (worse than FP's) and switching lag (also worse than FP's) are bigger problems. The bundled Homesite software is nice, but I've found problems with version matches in switching between DW and Homesite (note 7/6/99 : Homesite is apparently no longer included in DW2.0 academic).
Fonts and stylesheets are handled very well; better, I think, than FrontPage, though I don't have a close comparison at hand. (note 7/6/99 - DW seems to duplicate global stylesheets to every folder)
The timeline is something I'll probably like more as I learn more Flash - it is structured very much like a Flash or Director timeline, and allows you to write functional DHTML path animations pretty easily.
The built-in Javascripting capabilities did not impress me; mouseover code generated in DW 1.2 did not work and was impossible to read and repair. I haven't messed with it since.
The FTP client included with DW is, well, an FTP client. There is a feature that allows files to be checked in and out, which sounds like it would be handy for collaborative projects. I haven't tried it yet, though. (note 7/6/99 - The site manager has been greatly improved in DW 2.0 picking up a lot of FrontPage type features)
Lastly the floating toolbars are a nice touch - very Apple-y, designer-y. I would love to have a second monitor to leave them in while I worked on the page in the first.
And as so many reviews mention, DW doesn't mess with your code, or at least not much - it does add </p> and other silly inessentials.
So it's not great, but that's good enough.