Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / February 2008

In article
<c2076bc8-a96a-4244-a505-173a3ea24770@m34g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,

See my previous reply. There are plenty of WYSIWYG HTML editors to
choose from on Mac OS X.

In article
<jollyroger-C94D10.17033601022008@70-3-168-216.area5.spcsdns.net>,

Mmm. That "arguably" part is always the gotcha, innit?

I use, and teach, both DreamWeaver and GoLive. I've used DreamWeaver
since version 2 and GoLive since it was GoLive CyberStudio 1.0, before
Adobe bought it. I have logged literally thousands of hours in both.

I abandoned DreamWeaver after version 3, and switched to GoLive as my
production program. As each new version of DreamWeaver came out, I'd get
it, use it to see if it was still broken, then give up when I found it
was.

I want to love DreamWeaver, really I do. But it just has too many
serious bugs, including:

- Beginning in DreamWeaver 3, an off-by-one bug was introduced in the
way it calculates sizes of nested tables under certain conditions. A
fixed-width table nested inside another table will sometimes be assigned
a size that is one pixel too large, especially for multiply nested
tables or for fixed-width tables inside fixed-width cells. This bug has
persisted through every version of DW released after (I haven't tried
the version in CS3, so I don't know if it's still there or not), and can
make going back and editing complex tables after the fact a big hassle.

- DreamWeaver's built-in FTP is extremely fragile. It will fail to
download, fail to upload, or in some cases crash altogether if the FTP
server returns the dates associated with files in an unexpected format.
The FTP standard, nd its various extensions, allows a server to specify
one of several formats for dates; if DW encounters an FTP server that
uses any of these formats other than the default, as is the case with,
for example, certain FTP server software from IBM, it chokes.

- In GoLive, if you have an object (like a picture, a div, or some other
element) which has a JavaScript associated with it, and you copy it to
the Clipboard, then paste it in another file, the associated JavaScript
goes with it. In DW, it doesn't. This means you must then separately
locate and copy the associated JavaScripts.

In GoLive, if you copy a picture to the Clipboard, then paste it into
another page in a different directory on the same site, GoLive will
update the path to the picture automatically. It will also automatically
update any links as necessary. DreamWeaver doesn't; the picture, and any
links associated with it, must be manually fixed.

- Forms. OMG, do I hate forms in DW. The most annoying problem is that
moving, copying, or dragging the elements in a form in DW will not bring
the associated HTML FORM tag along. So, for example, select an entire
form in WYSIWYG view, copy it, paste it elsewhere or in a different
page; the elements go, but the FORM tag itself doesn't!

Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, I will unfortunately have to live with
DreamWeaver's flaws, or hope that Adobe's engineers fix them. I'm really
hoping that Adobe will fix these flaws and problems, and at last I won't
be incited to homicidal rage whenever I use DW.

Oh, well. I suppose if worst comes to worst, I can just hold on to
GoLive CS2 for a while...