Why is Dreamweaver Dead?

Dreamweaver is still a great IDE for web developing. It's not only a WYSIWYG, and I think that it's only the tip of the iceberg.

What I really like that I didn't quite find in the alternatives:

You can split your window in half with 2 different codes. You have a color picker You have auto completion Built in SFTP-Uploader Great Project manager Great searcher with regex

etc...

I have to admit I switched to Sublime Text 2 since last year and I haven't really looked back, but I miss the auto completion and the color picker a lot.

There are some fairly clear indicators from Adobe itself about the future of dreamweaver.

Note what they say in the 'Code' section here: http://html.adobe.com/toolsandservices/ "We think there’s a need for a different type of code editor – we’re working on something and will have more to share soon."

... which is plainly referring to this project: https://github.com/adobe/brackets

Not only isn't Dreamweaver dead, but it may shock many to know that Director isn't dead either.

Why? Well in the case of Dreamweaver you have an audience that invested a great deal of time to learn a toolset. And while under the hood there are better ways to code, jumping from WYSIWYG to looking at lines of code is a real turn off if you don't do web production as your full time occupation. The other reason is that even by offering an upgrade path to other Adobe tools a certain percentage of users will leave Adobe when a product is discontinued.

Of course Dreamweaver is dead to folks who really do HTML all day, but I suspect that those folks never really used Dreamweaver back in the day or they stopped using it when CSS for layout started to become popular.

A key lesson that many of us can learn from this is that ease-of-use is really important to a non-tech audience. When I look at developers playing with HTML/CSS it reminds me of a phototypesetting machine setup circa the early 80s before desktop publishing programs came about.

I hated Dreamweaver with a passion from the start. It wrote crappy code. And no surprise that it tried everything in its power to keep you away from the code. I didn't want a WYSIWYG... I wanted to a smart text editor. The Dreamweaver we have now is a far cry from the garbage it started out as. I use it because it has a few nice features. Dreamweaver is a pretty decent "smart text editor". Language awareness and code completion are very handy things. But I never use any of the WYSIWYG and widget stuff. And I still like to use a separate FTP app for FTP rather then let my IDE do it. My favorite was Allaire's Homesite. It was purchased by Macromedia, who maintained it briefly. They were later purchased by Adobe, who attempted to fold Homesite into Dreamweaver but failed to do it right. Homesite is dead. :(

Dreamweaver has only replaced ms frontpage, Nevertheless it is quite a nice tool if you are using the Adobe eco-system. Dreamweaver integrate pretty well with PHP/ASP and databases with code templates.

However it had (and probably still have) a reputation for producing bloated code (and usually use its own framework to do so), and is not evolving as Fast as WebKit nightly.

As most php shop are now relying on CMS and/or equivalent framework, dreamweaver should probably evolve toward a template creator.

Dreamweaver used to be the bane of my existence when I worked on a sites that had been initially created with it.

Funny enough, I have an article on my site about tweaking mm_menu.js that gets regular visits still to this day. So I know there are still people out there using it. This is the page - http://verysimple.com/2006/10/23/mm_menujs-and-the-firefox-m...

Besides the text-based tools mentioned, there's BlueGriffon for those who want a FOSS WYSIWYG editor.

I've been using it a bit of late and it seems pretty decent (though I still tend to do most of my HTML writing in TextMate).

Edit: add link.

http://bluegriffon.org/

I stopped using DW when I switched from Windows to Mac and found out how slow it was at editing simple HTML files. While I initially missed the built-in FTP support, I found myself a simple text editor with text highlighting and an FTP app and never looked back. Now I have Sublime Text 2 and git deployment.

Not sure why you think Sublime loses points for being cross platform. That's why I use it, being a Mac and Windows user.