Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.

What were these "troublesome parts"? The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

There was a ton of... not exactly footguns, just things to keep in mind if you’ve wanted your site to work as you intended in all browsers. The webcompat nowadays is way better now.

That said, personally I’ve never understood Dreamweaver either. By the time I tried it, I’ve already got used to Notepad++ and writing HTML by hand, so I’ve just treated it as another text editor... and IIRC it just felt way more laggy than Notepad++, with a browser preview panel that took half of my 4:3 display. Maybe I’d discover some cool features if I’ve spent some more time in it? I dunno.

> The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct.

HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    <title>Parsing Example</title>
    <p>Some text. <em>&#42;wow&#42;</em></p>

Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.

> HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML

Worse, it was an extended superset (ha!) of SGML. At least 20 years ago, SGML::Parser would reject some valid HTML documents.

That said, it was really easy to type correctly in a text editor (especially compared to actual SGML), particularly one that indented and matched tags for you.

I never understood Dreamweaver. The first thing it asked me when making a new website was ... what the resolution of my user's screen is? I don't know that!

Its web development software from the 90s/00s, a period when websites were built by first having a designer meticulously mock everything up in Photoshop on a 640x480 canvas (maybe 800x600 or 1024x768 in later days), that mockup would then be handed over to a web developer (hi, that was me) who would take that mockup, slice it up into a billion little images, and then put them in a wildly complex set of nested HTML tables. The designer would then have a look over it and provide critique on the fact some element was 3px misaligned, or the font size was incorrect.

During this period I was berated by our studio lead for using new fangled technologies like CSS layout that could adapt to different sized screens instead of sticking to the trusty HTML soup Dreamweaver would spit out.

Don't worry, designers still complain about something being 3px off, or a font being weight 700 instead of 800.

This is exactly how I remember my early webdev days. Before Dreamweaver we were using NetObjects Fusion.

Just like AI vibecoded websites... Good luck understanding the code when the AI bubble explodes and you can't afford the insane price that AI will have by then.

Was that class taught by a certain woman who had a business making websites, per-chance?

You just described my teacher, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t go to the same middle school.

Probably not, but then again, it's a small world! What state? Northeast?

Midwest.

Were they paying for the Dreamweaver licenses?

When I had web design a bit after 2010, they still used Dreamweaver and yeah you could get a license for free via the university. That’s pretty normal (eg giving you a Visual Studio license, Office, all that). It was more crazy that the course was so incredibly basic (nothing more than static page building in dreamweaver) at this college compared to the other one I later transferred to

Please. Universities have students by the short and curlies. They can academically do basically whatever they want, and fail you for not complying. Professors can even demand their book be purchased, and fail for not buying the book.

Most universities are unethical shitholes that can do basically whatever they want to gatekeep a diploma.

It’s getting so bad. My wife is in a remote school where they fail students occasionally to squeeze a little extra $$ out of them.

I’m sorry your wife failed some classes, but it’s probably not because the school wants some extra money.

They didn't say that.

They did seem to think that it's a problem for schools to fail students.

They didn't say that either.

What they did say is that the school sometimes fails students to get more money — supposedly implying that this was not because they did not meet the passing criteria.

This does not preclude failing students when they deserve it.

It is ok to question of what makes them believe they would have passed the exams without this financial motivation for the school, but they were pretty clear IMO.

Lets use names.

Western Governors University. Online 4 year degree. Classes are passed when you pass the "high stakes" (read: proctorio test). This means if you know the material, then you can pass a class in 1 day.

HOWEVER, when you do your final test, they only tell you pass or fail. They do NOT show you what questions you got right or wrong. If you fail, you have to wait 5 days and go through professor hoops. Of course, you naturally never actually talked to the prof. Its all online through ZyBooks.

But WGU benefits on failing people, and by hiding what you failed at. Because the longer you attend, the more they charge. Their response is basically "Get Gud Scrub but we're not gonna tell you how".

It’s not a problem to fail students. But when the online wing of the school has a 35% graduation rate, doesn’t hold lectures, and has a swarm of disgruntled reviews from people who feel like the school is in the business of taking Pell grants and maxing their student loans then stonewalling them when they hit mid 3rd year (right after you’re in for a pound) and start asking questions about where all the money went and why they were sitting at a B all semester then magically ended up with a 59 after the final, it’s a little sus.

How are you so sure?

There is so much shady things about academic env that it doesnt sound scary

Ive witnessed situation where "hard" prof was teaching and many ppl failed, and then thry received "easy" prof and they passed

But they had to pay for exams and retake, etc

I had a teacher who told us to make a website using Powerpoint..

Turns out you save save as HTML and any links you put between slides become anchor tags.

Pretty neat, but hurt my soul to have all my classmates do that

Hmm. Dreamweaver must be what the cool kids were using instead of Frontpage.

I was a cool kid! I used FrontPage :D

Yeah that's what they all thought :P