I have been a Dreamweaver user since version 1.2. My relationship with the app is like a hollywood love affair. Hot and cold. On again, off again. When I first got into the app, I had previously been using SimpleText in Mac OS 7/8 to create simple webpages (lots of frames, yeecchhh.) When the WYSIWYG metaphor came out I was floored. Coming from a design background, this seemed like a panacea. After using it for a few sites, I felt as though my actual knowledge of how HTML worked wasn’t growing, so I gave BBedit a good try. I used that for quite a while.

Shortly after that, Dreamweaver Ultradev 4 came out and I began to dabble with PHP/MySQL… It seemed pretty cool, but by and large I stayed mostly with the text editor I had grown to love. I built a few DB powered sites by hand and then had a couple projects come up that were just too big for me to handle by myself writing PHP by hand. I took the time to learn the Dreamweaver way of server behaviors and felt empowered by what they could do. Around that time I got bit by the standards bug and started excising tables from all of my sites. Dreamweaver MX’s CSS handling was pretty poor around this time, so it was abandoned as an editor for me again.

With MX2004′s and Dreamweaver 8′s new and improved CSS capabilities, I jumped back in and really liked it overall. I wasn’t too sure about how 8 randomly created a few styles called “style1″, etc, but really, it was a serious improvement over the font tags and table soup. Shortly after my honeymoon phase with this a huge shift across the entire industry began. The Web2.0 Ruby On Rails / Open source Framework, AJAX, RIA juggernaut. At work we have been spending our time getting up to speed with Interface/JQuery and CakePHP.

Dreamweaver has all but been abandoned for everything except the narrowest types pages (not too simple, but not too complex). It’s too big and slow for rapid development, too quick and light for serious OOP apps. The inability to truly separate the logic from the markup is just as bad as the font tags of yore for us developers that stride the line between design and development.

In order for me to actively get back into Dreamweaver, I think I really need a few things to happen.

1. The integration of some AJAX framework – I’m sure it will be Spry, but I don’t know if I’m into Spry. The nonstandards compliant custom attributes and lack of unobtrusiveness seems to fly in the face of just about every conversation I have with clients about what makes good web practices good. Regardless of the framework used, I hope that it behaves much like a marriage of the current server behaviors and the client behaviors pallette.
2. A solid Javascript debugger integrated into the app – If we are going to build AJAX apps in Dreamweaver, we’ll need a good way to test them, right? Think Firebug, but built into your IDE.
3. Webservices all over the place – Snap in support for SOAP/XMLRPC and also all the nifty web APIs like FlickR and GoogleMaps, etc would just be hot. Think of all the sweet mashups that would be out there if Adobe gave their creative audience the power to do something cool in this area. Many of the best designers simply can’t code, but with DW doing the heavy lifting, we could get some pretty pretty little apps.
4. Better WYSIWYG Preview – It would be pretty cool if they took a page from the Apollo team and used a Webkit build to show us what we are working on. The live preview for DW hasn’t been so great since I gave up tables.
5. Support for / Use of OOP PHP and modular design practices – I have to say, the ability to quickly scaffold an app in Cake or Ruby is damn impressive. How about juicing up the server behaviors in DW to give us something comparable. Reusable code would also be good. I’m sure you’ve noticed Dreamweaver isn’t so bright when you cut the PHP logic out of the page and put it in an include, the behaviors pretty much are guaranteed to break.
6. Better Flash embedding – I use SWFObject pretty much exclusively. The method for putting SWFs in your page built into Dreamweaver is not what I would call professional at all. No detection, or alternate content. How about building the Flash detection kit into DW?
7. Mobile Device Support – Smartphones, Wiis, Tablets, etc are just exploding right now… Let’s get a good way to preview the stuff we make in the closest way possible to the devices we are delivering to.
8. CVS/SVN Integration – I’m not talking about the WebDAV method currently in Dreamweaver. I have some developers that don’t use DW and if DW used a more standard method for integration in a version control system, I would get more traction on using one at work, I’m sure. Add to the fact that some designers won’t use a versioning system unless it’s easy and painless and it seems like a logical choice for DW to pick up some key functionality here.
9. Speed Speed Speed – I can just write code faster in BBEdit than I can in DW. Period. DW is sluggish oftentimes and I’m not quite sure why. The FTP process is pretty slow, too. Optimization just really hasn’t been happening the last couple of versions that Macromedia put out.
10. Universal Binary for Macs – Of course this is going to happen.

So where is the public beta for this? Adobe has been very open at labs with all of the other tools and apps coming out these days, but for the #1 web design app on the planet, pure silence. I’ve dug through labs and the forums, can’t find anything… Hmm.

Posted on February 11, 2007

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