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?
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!!!!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
In one of the most consequential hacks ever, the Chinese broke into RSA in order to then access Lockheed Martin and steal classified info.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
> Why did my simple site need front page extensions on the server?
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>
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.
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. :-(
Fireworks came with the Macromedia Studio MX 2004 suite (I had the education version -- ~$299 was the happy medium for me between full price and pirating). While I made great use of Flash and Dreamweaver in that bundle, Fireworks was always an enigma. I think it exported some animated gifs for me. What did y'all make with it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always felt like Adobe‘s big problem was they were fixated on trying to adapt any web technology to work for print designers, that any design should fit in a certain window size or resolution. This worked ok until mobile devices hit a certain tipping point and the idea of responsive design became king. They didn’t know how to handle that, and the tools fell way behind.
Readit News
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Allaire