> FrontPage was a nightmare.

They all were. HTML was so limited that producing it visually from a WYSIWYG editor was guaranteed to be totally wrong or exceedingly verbose.

With flex and grid I imagine creating such an editor is easier today, but I also imagine those consumers are happy to work off of templates and people who work on front and know HTML and spend most of their time building react components.

“The HTML is totally wrong and exceedingly verbose” is not exactly something someone who used frontpage cared about.

Well, from my experience there were professional teams using these sorts of tools at the time.

My first gig was hand crafting html pages and the guy I replaced (a "programmer") used one of these WYSIWYG tools.

It wasn't that uncommon in the early days of web shops

HTML was never the problem. It is simple enough to be taught to non technical people. The issue is styling it, making it looks beautiful. And this is where the truth appears: HTML was not designed for building magazin-like pages but hypertext paper books. The very recent introduction of CSS grid shows it.

If HTML could be used as a collection of widget akin to Windows Forms, with an easy grid system (somewhat like XAML), there building an UI page creator would be easy, and user could edit the output unlike with the current tech.

What functionality is missing, in your mind, from Sqaurespace, Webflow, and Wix in order to classify them as UI page creators?

A usable, fast, resource efficient website output in the end.

Windows Forms (AFAIK) are not designed to handle multitude of screen formats. HTML/CSS is.

A bit tangential, but Wix lost all reputation in my eyes with the dumpster fire that is the redesigned DeviantArt after their acquisition. They took a nicely functional website and created an unusable monstrosity that takes tens of seconds of whirring fans to display a single image. My mind boggles at how a company focused on building websites could release something like that.

I've spent weeks trying to speed up a Wix site, and I barely succeeded. The amount of requests it made... no, Wix websites are all insanely badly done. I'm not surprised at all.

I remember being c. 12 and writing webpages in FrontPage on a windows98 pc.

I have no idea how i had frontpage, but i'm sure it lead into acquiring "real skills".

There's a lot more to apps like dreamweaver, frontpage, etc. than it seems. They are bad tools, but also comes with a linear learning curve that has its advantages.

why is/was dreamweaver bad, now? I got a tremendous amount of web stuff done many years ago. it all worked well and I couldn't have done it as quickly or well without it...

It was generally considered bad because it (and other programs like it) often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead, spurious tags and what you might call "bloat". While there's certainly bloat today too it was a different experience on dialup, especially in the early days when you paid not only for the phone call but were also often charged a steep hourly rate by the ISP.

There was also quite a bit of elitism and protectionism about it, because for a while a lot of people were actually more or less making a living from writing nothing but plain HTML. If anyone can make a web page, what good are HTML skills? Quickly, let's find something bad about it and save our jobs!

> often generated bad markup with a lot of overhead,

I just looked into the nightmarish tree of nested div's and span's (of which FrontPage and DreamWeaver are innocent) that's a Twitter feed. JFC, I don't want to ever have to scrape one.

I used Dreamweaver, back in the day.

You could have it produce outstanding markup, but that meant spending a lot of quality time, playing with the templates.

I mostly used it for its preview capabilities and as a text editor, for which it worked pretty well, building my own templates by hand. If you actually knew HTML, CSS and a smattering of JS, it was a great tool for organizing the small bits and pieces of a web site. If you didn’t, things could get ugly pretty fast.

I never used Dreamweaver but I did use Adobe GoLive for a time. As I recollect it was better than doing things by hand (or I wouldn't have used it) but it generated such complex and ugly HTML that you were effectively locked into the tool. The HTML was such a mess that doing hand patching was very hard.

Dreamweaver was quite ok, actually. The issue was that it was limited, and it wasn't a good fit for every kind of website.

Want to write documentation, or a personal website full of text and pictures? Maybe a simple text site for your restaurant or small business without much fluff? Then it's alright.

Want to do a professional-looking site that looks like the ones you pay money for? Maybe look for something else, or at the very least start with a handcrafted template, instead of "faking it" with sliced images and javascript hover.

The reaction against Dreamweaver was IMO understandable because there were definitely some people in the industry who were convinced that Dreamweaver was enough for anything.

Dreamweaver enabled those horrible sites with sliced images in place of flowing hypertext.

devs don't trust wizards until they understand their magic.

>"The new static generators create great sites, but they are way too technical for most users."

Just like to add that from what I've found they're also generally way "too technical" for technical/programming users too. Each time I try to set one up, I waste 1-2 hours of my time trying, git pulling, refreshing, testing, reading docs, etc before realizing what a ginormous time sink it is with their various weird DSL's and hierarchical organization methods and templates and whatnot.

Yeah. That's why I don't use them. I am sick to death of WordPress, but it does allow me to not spend days on end, playing with my site.

> FrontPage was a nightmare. I still wake up screaming...

Today's 22MB main.min.js bundled an empty index.html script loader is much, much worse.

> FrontPage was a nightmare.

Wix is a nightmare.

I second this. FrontPage was simple to used, produced ugly, but static and fast sites, everyone was happy. Wix is a monster to use, and it spits CPU eating offsprings.

It was nicknamed "Don'tPage" for a reason.