I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad.

It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.

▲ frankest 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).

▲ christophilus 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.

	▲	ghurtado 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you've been doing it for that long (about as long as I have), then surely you remember all the times you had to clean up after the "git 'er done" types. I'm not saying they don't have their place, but without us they would still be making the world go round. Only backwards.
	▲	KronisLV 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think there's more dimensions that also matter a bunch: `* a bad craftsman will get pedantic about the wrong things (e.g. SOLID/DRY as dogma) and will create architectures that will make development velocity plummet ("clever" code, deep inheritance chains, "magic" code with lots of reflection etc.) * a bad practician will not care about long term maintainability either, or even correctness enough not to introduce a bunch of bad bugs or slop, even worse when they're subtle enough to ship but mess up your schema or something` So you can have both good and bad outcomes with either, just for slightly different reasons (caring about the wrong stuff vs not caring). I think the sweet spot is to strive for code that is easy to read and understand, easy to change, and easy to eventually replace or throw out. Obviously performant enough but yadda yadda premature optimization, depends on the domain and so on...
	▲	fragmede 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It takes both.

▲ chrisweekly 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The HTML generated by Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode might not have been ideal, but it was far superior to the mess produced by MS Front Page. With Dreamweave, it was at least possible to use it as a starting point.

▲ BobbyTables2 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

MS FrontPage also went out of its way to do the same.

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_joel an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It might have been pretty horrible but I hold Frontpage 97 with fond memories, it started my IT career, although not for HTML reasons.

The _vti_cnf dir left /etc/passwd downloadable, so I grabbed it from my school website. One Jack the Ripper later and the password was found.

I told the teacher resposible for the IT it was insecure and that ended up getting me some work experience. Ended up working the summer (waiting for my GCSE results) for ICL which immeasurably helped me when it was time to properly start working.

Did think about defacing, often wonder that things could have turned out very much differently!

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pram 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s funny this came up, because it was kinda similar to the whole “AI frauds” thing these days.

I don’t particularly remember why, but “hand writing” fancy HTML and CSS used to be a flex in some circles in the 90s. A bunch of junk and stuff like fixed positioning in the source was the telltale sign they “cheated” with FrontPage or Dreamweaver lol

	▲	supriyo-biswas 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My only gripe was that they tended to generate gobs of “unsemantic” HTML. You resized a table and expect it to be based on viewport width? No! It’s hardcoded “width: X px” to whatever your size the viewport was set to.

▲ pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love how people speak about Dreamweaver in the past, while Adobe keeps getting money for it,

https://developer.adobe.com/dreamweaver/

And yes, as you can imagine for the kind of comments I do regarding high level productive tooling and languages, I was a big Dreamwever fan back in the 2000's.

▲ ghurtado 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver was to web development what ...

I just sat here for 5 minutes and I wasn't able to finish that sentence. So I think that's a statement in itself.

	▲	riffraff an hour ago \| parent [-]
		..VB6 was to windows dev? People with very little competence could and did get things done, but it was a mess underneath.

▲ girvo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I miss Dreamweaver. Combining it with Fireworks was a crazy productive combo for me back in the mid 00’s!

My first PHP scripts and games were written using nothing more than Notepad too funnily enough

	▲	panzi 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Back in the early 00s I brought gvim.exe on a floppy disk to school because I refused to write XSLT, HTML, CSS, etc without auto-indent or syntax highlighting.