Yes! Dreamweaver was good 19 years ago and remains good today. Being able to see what you're doing, without running like treacle in the browser whilst editing (I'm looking at you, Divi and other WP visual theme builders), is an awesome experience. Like professionals in many other fields expect from their software.

I recall using HotDog Professional for my personal stuff. Anyone else use it?

I was there, too. Dreamweaver was not good enough.

Notepad.exe was good 19 years ago.

Dreamweaver? Not so much.

:)

It was a great tool for learning HTML and CSS though, but mainly because you would always end up just going into the source to fix it and view in DW.

I would be very nervous of anyone using it these days for anything else.

Most who used Dreamweaver and relied on its extensions are now using another similar app called Wappler.

Good for what ? I remember designers trying to create pages with and the generated code was useless garbage once the customisation requests came in and they called in a dev

I saw it work reasonably well when someone took a code-first approach with the overall website templates which avoided the mess from building these up using DW's code generation. You could then set it up so people could only mess with the certain parts of the page which avoided the overall site getting messed up as you added others. This got cleaner when they introduced Contribute.

Dreamweaver was created for a time when there was still a webmaster-type role in companies. These people didn't necessarily have what we'd consider a strong dev skillset, but the world around them had started to change which explains the range of capabilities in Dreamweaver.

If you want to see some terrible server-side code generation, you should checkout Drumbeat (https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat).

Because we wanted Dynamic webpage back then. Or at least dynamically generated webpage when something is updated, like links and comments ( When every site was still hosting their own comment sections ). Develop Locally and push Static Site to web may work on Web pages, but doesn't really work for website with some traffic or what we called blog today.

Especially when we were on HDD and single core CPU, updating a few hundred pages takes quite a bit of time. Before uploading tens of Megabytes of Data that takes hours on 56K or ISDN. Compared to being hosted on the web where everything was a press of a button.

Now we are on SSD, where our IOPS is anywhere from 100x to 1000x faster. Even updating sites like Tomshardware or Anandtech should only take seconds. We have Gigabit Internet, uploading should no longer be a problem.

I think vast majority of web site could simply be Static pages, with a small dose of javascript. And may be in the future you could even install your CMS on iPad or iPhone. There is no need to worry about anther Tumblr or Geocities taking down all your content. Your content will stay on your device, and possibly with some sort of Cloud Data Backup. ( iCloud or Google Drive )

This is actually something I keep talking about since ~2017. ( I cant believe that is 5 years already ) So I am glad we are finally moving in that direction.

We had the likes of Netscape Composer, Front Page and Dreamweaver. They produced mountains of un-maintainable and not non-compliant html code.

When HTML5 came along there was a big push for compliant sites. Also it made sense to have a developer use the power of CSS3 to handle layouts and responsiveness elegantly. So the WYSIWYG editors fell out of favour.

From what I remember, the push for html5 and super lean / clean / and 'validating code' for google search results made it difficult for the older tools to stay in favor.

Also the move to mobile.. and not just "m.site" - making so javacript / bootstrap type things came to be favored for a while (lack of grid / flex in browsers at the time) - which mostly required text editors instead of wysiwyg.

the business models for investing in software were shaping cloud things around that time (some say for better, I say for worse) - so webflow, wordpress, adobe cloud everything, and similar had a chance to do the things that stand alone download and own software could of been doing.

Faster internet being more prevalent and such of course helped with these things.

I've been itching to spend a couple hours testing pinegrow site building ( https://pinegrow.com ) to see if it is reminiscent of the netobjects days.. and now that wordpress is getting increasingly painful to use and maintain, I'll likely get to that sooner than later.

So now simple solutions, static HTML, free or one-time fee CMSs are sexy again. (economy is not good, who wants another subscription?)

I know because 14 years ago we have created static, drag and drop CMS that people still buy today. People value basic features. And it's hard to make a complex software that's easy to use.

Basic features are still enough, after 14 years. https://sitecake.com

The problem is that if you have to pull down the site to edit content, it defeats like 99% of the use cases of a CMS. The whole point of a CMS is to provide an interface for editing a website without editing code directly and not having the code on locally to make edits.

The inability to have interactive data-based content in static sites is why I went away from them, but the ability to progressively enhance a Next or (especially) SvelteKit site with data-y bits when it makes sense has gotten me in the habit of using them. Kind of a fan.

With this:

https://github.com/jrm4/Eight-Five-Zero

(Kind of messy, but it's utilitarian for my work and such)

It's really nice that I can update the website in the middle of class as I'm teaching with very little issue.