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.