My post about Dreamweaver 9′s impending release laid out my hopes and dreams about what I’d like to see in the next major release of the application, and it’s first release from Adobe.

Most of them look to be coming true, if, at least you don’t care too much about web standards…

• I like the XML integration, alot!
• I like the CSS layouts (as much as I can with out seeing the code they produce)
• The addition of some AJAX support was a necessary thing, certainly.

My main gripe with the whole thing, is how can I sell myself as a standards based designer when theAJAX library chosen produces nonstandard markup… case in point:

Even Odd Row Samples – Pretty sure this isn’t valid XHTML: <tr spry:repeat=“dsEmployees” spry:even=“even” spry:odd=“odd”> – in fact look at the validator results from that demo’s page.

Now, I just picked this one example from the larger demo’s page, and I don’t have the time to look through the other samples, but I’m sure that many of them use similiar sorts of custom attributes, etc.¬† Now, Alistapart addressed this very issue of custom namespace’s/DTDs about two years ago. From the article:

Custom DTDs can be a very useful tool to enrich the existing markup languages or create entirely new ones. One always has to keep in mind that they are tantamount to creating a new language, and that proprietary languages are best kept in closed environments where they can be taught to a limited set of agents and tools, and NOT to make the web a modern version of the Tower of Babel by unleashing them in the wilderness.

Sounds just like what we got from Adobe, right? Why not use Prototype or JQuery? I just don’t get it. Someone, please, fill me in.

Posted on March 28, 2007

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