Matt 26z

Whenever I saw a job posting that requires Dreamweaver skills, I'd always say real webmasters use a text editor. Now, I'm not so sure.

Last night I downloaded the Dreamweaver trial, and I must say it's come a long way since I last used it many years ago. I don't know yet if I'll be making the switch though.

At first I had problems using it from scratch, so I loaded up their templates and my own pages, and that made it more clear how it works. Seems like it might be a real time saver.

Lifer

I won't say that I start a fresh new page with no code because cutting and pasting will go a long way.

But I never use one of those products.

Notepad for me

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beerbaron

Not a big fan of dreamweaver.
Used to destroy code for me. havnt used it for years. may have gotten better tho.

Homesite is the best imo! pretty much a glorified notepad. forces you to write code by hand but has good features such as automatically adding close tags and shit like that.


unfortunately it doesnt come for the mac

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GreyWolf

Hand code almost everything with a text editor Matt, but sometimes look at DW for visual aspects.

Whatever code is usually template stuff, so can be reused in many other sites and just want to get that bit 100% correct - for all browsers.

CyR

Text Editors are the way to go. Sure DW may speed things up, but IMHO it only writes bloatcode.

CBR_Grant

both ways


depends how lazy i feel

TexasDreams

C All of the above!!!

Anyone that says they do everything in notepad.exe obviously is only doing code that the average 3rd grader is capable of. Plain and simple truth, and I say this coming from mainstream companies that are consistently in the Forbes-50.

If anyone here has ever run as the program lead for projects in the annual $25B plus range, I'd love to hear the arguments against that statement.

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CyR

Over the years I've used the following Text editors over the years:
Homesite (pre Macromedia messing it... yes back with Alaire), UltraEdit, and finally landing on EditPad Pro.

I've also started using Aptana in the last week or so, but still use EditPad for most of my stuff, well that and Vi.

Sure Notepad mightn't be the best thing to use, but you can't say that it couldn't be used. Yes, speed and functionality are a big factor if you'd have to use it, also multi-tasking between different files, but fact is that they still could be used. On the other hand, I'd love to see DW used in big companies that require precise coding, streamline pages without bloating and flexability when it comes to anything more than a Image cut into slices.

martinsc

i use several editors
for quick editing of existing pages - Notepad++
for html - WeBuilder 2007
for php - PHP Designer 2007 (localhost preview rocks )

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GreyWolf

Not necessarily TD depending what background experience is etc. Simple can be nice I've written many millions of lines of programming code (not particularly html blah) and the majority of this is with a text editor and prob most of that was OOP code which could be then inserted into a RAD system for a collaborative development standard. Tho agree - if it's simple html the tendency can be towards the more basic end.

Totally agree with this where there is a form of collaboration involved or "groupware" - and a number of other reasons

Cap'n Steve

Bullshit. And no, I don't make $25 billion a year, Mr. Gates, but I have seen some horrendous shit generated by HTML editors. I second the vote for Notepad++.

GreyWolf

Tend to agree - just don't like bloated code where this is not necessary. There can be times where it's better to accept the bloated code as a base standard - but, for the average webmaster, it sounds like overkill

Kevsh

Yep. been using it for I don't know how many years and still love it.

If you're still on Notepad you're throwing time away: For one, the global search+replace (with regular expressions) in HomeSite will save you hours and about 50 other advantages.

Doctor Dre

I use frontpage to do most of the stuff, and edit it afterwards.

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Ed / CzCash

I use Smultron for simple code (like headers, etc.). But for really difficult elements (like tables, CSS-elements) I use Dreamweaver CS3.

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Quotealex

Same here

VicD

notepad for me

Martin3

Frontpage then clean it up in notepad.
Using html editors is simply faster, even if you have to clean it up a little afterwards.

Anyone who says otherwise doesn't value their time.

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Basic_man

Text editor to code a webpage? Bulllllllllshittttttttttttt!

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Sen

dreamweaver but mostly its in code view. But i love the tools

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testpie

Winsyntax all the way. I stopped with WYSIWYG editors after the horrendous crap that FrontPage Express used to belch out, and basically, after I taught myself HTML and then moved onto the cleaner, less-bloated ideology of XHTML and CSS.

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1337DK

I use Notepad for must thing, but have also used MySQL Turbo Manager a lot for coding. Now i have changed to Zend Studio.

alby_persignup

Dreamweaver for me

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Jace

whatever I need at the time

I rarely ever have to code from scratch anymore though, someone somewhere has already done what I need

TheDoc

I could argue this...

Based on your statement the company only codes in one language. I'm done.

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Ecchi22

I use text editor. EditPlus2 ;)

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JamesK2

I use Dreamweaver because it's faster. After finishing it I clean up the code a bit and voila it's done. For me using notepad is a waste of time, and time is money.

Fuck what other people think of that. It works fine for me

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AdultHardcore

I like notepad

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Ecchi22

Great choice

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just a punk

Visual editors only. It's a 21th century - enough said

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EdgeXXX

For the most part UltraEdit-32 (esp. when coding the CSS), but I always run every page through Dreamweaver (CS3) before it goes online.

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testpie

Speaking of the "21th" century, you might want to consider pulling your site up to W3C standard compliance: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...line&gro up=0

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just a punk

Actually I don't see any problems to add MIME Media Type, DOCTYPE etc manually. The main part of design can be (I'd say must be) done in visual editor.

Also I won't rely on W3 validators because the actual Web browsers have "their own opinion" on the HTML standards. Some more links for you:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...line&group= 0 - Failed validation, 28 Errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0 - Failed validation, 123 Errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0 - Failed validation, 3 Errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0 - Failed validation (Sorry! This document can not be checked)

Enough said?

P.S. maturedesign.com is VERY old site which wasn't actually redesigned for a long time.

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Libertine

I use UE as well. It's just easier, especially when coding the html, css, javascript and php for a single site all at once.

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testpie

Just because the big boys are big doesn't mean they can or even know of valid code; based on that argument, IE must be the world's most standards compliant browser ever to be created, because Microsoft is so large a player, and nobody must ever have felt the need to develop any CSS hacks around what is obviously a perfect product...

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wdforty

I use dreamweaver. Why use notepad when DW completes the code for you?

Lazy, sure. Time saver? You bet.

Instead of typing, for example,

border-bottom: 1px solid #fff;

type the first few letters and hit TAB.

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geeknik

I use a program called Notepad2. Very nice, easy on memory usage too.

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Sosa

I don't design, but for simple changes etc I use dreamweaver

just a punk

You didn't get it. For example cnn.com has 123 "errors" however it shows well in all browsers I know and the SE's love it. maturedesign.com you have pointed me to has only 39 errors and it also shows well in every browser, so why could I care about it?

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jeffrey

+1

Anyone that codes ONLY in notepad is wasting some serious time.

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Babaganoosh

Real webmasters don't use text editors for everything anymore. It used to be true but these days it's just macho bullshit. If I have a quick edit to make on something I will use Edit Pad Pro http://www.editpadpro.com/. If I have to do an entire page or add more than a few lines I open up dreamweaver.

There is one application that I have used for almost 8 years now that is a great mix of a text editor and WYSIWYG editor. That's http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/

If anyone really is doing all of their designing in a text editor then they are sadistic and infinitely less productive than someone who does it the the right way.

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testpie

Because the crux of your argument was that non-visual editors are effectively useless, which simply isn't true, and just because it shows correctly in the browsers you use and ranks well in the SERPs doesn't mean that it won't lead to problems for users with disabilities, nor that other aspects such as bandwidth usage and disk space, particularly on larger sites with millions of hits per day could be vastly improved if people coded to the standards and cut out a lot of the bloatcode that WYSIWYG editors add.

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just a punk

I haven't said they are useless. I still doing some tasks in text editors, but I'm using visual ones to do 99% of work. Course everything could be done with natepad, but would you use notepad to to edit RTF files for example if thare are lots of powerful visual editors to do the same thing but much faster (e.g. WordPad, m$ Word etc)?

As I said above, it's 21st century today. So these reasons mean almost nothing now.

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Swish

vi 90% of the time

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drjones

Using notepad.exe for much of anything is generally a big flashing sign that says "rookie!"

Maybe adequate for making occasional notes or viewing simple text files, but for anything else, its unusable.

Do my editing in VIM, or TextMate if I'm in OSX.

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testpie

Most likely not, but taken from the other perspective, would you use MS Word to edit a text file when notepad is smaller, faster and more efficient?

I might be inclined to agree with you if it weren't for my belief that cleaner and less bloated code simply makes for a better and more efficient end product. Sure, you can use the excuse that bandwidth is cheaper these days, servers are becoming cheaper as the days go on and so forth, but why add bloat to your code, which will likely only bloat more as you modify it later down the line? It's a lazy attitude to have and it certainly doesn't earn you any favours when you've got twenty nested div tags and you can't find where each one ends, or which ones are necessary.

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Netscape Navigator Gold.

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Klen

I combine dreamweaver/crimson editor/ed html/fireworks

CDSmith

Both.

For designing NEW pages I usually start with Composer, a visual editor, then open the text editor and clean up the code. Once a page is done, all further updates and changes to it are done with the text editor.


Btw, anyone still using notepad needs to get with the times and start using TEXTPAD. It's a far better webmastering tool, notepad is like working with sticks and rocks compared to it.

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CyR

I really wish he'd port EPP over to Mac, I've been using it for 6-7 years now, and I miss it so.


Re: MS page pulled up on the validator. They probably used Word to do it :P I hated when clients would come to me and go, I have this webpage I made, I need it to be functional, open the files to see that the code (if you could call it that) between the head tags was no less than 50 lines of bullshit. Oh and don't forget the: <strong><font size="3"></font><i></i><font><font><strong></strong><u><font>The</font></strong>
code that is generated by people highlighting and selecting in WYSIWYG. *shudder*