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You're Smarter Than Dreamweaver

By Bud Kraus
bud@joyofcode.com
Joy Of Code
Creator And Instructor

v4 i12
Originally Published: August 14, 2008

I know a lot of people have come to rely upon Dreamweaver as a Cascading Style Sheet authoring tool. Why shouldn't they? Built into the same program where you make your web pages is the ability to style your pages. On the surface, I understand why. It's easy. Too easy.

But in this case, easy will lead you in the wrong direction.

Before I beat up DW - again - in the interest of full disclosure, I like DW. It is the best of its class as a web authoring tool. It does some things very well - like embedding images, inserting tables, and adding and managing links - without making a mess out of your code.

But for something like writing CSS, it does a horrendous job. I give Adobe some credit. They have tried to improve the product by licensing what Top Style does (a great standalone CSS authoring tool).

DW falls apart in the CSS area because of one overarching problem. It does not understand what the word "Cascade" means in style sheets (groups of style rules) that CASCADE.

That is the root of its downfall. Here's why you are smarter than DW. You can (and maybe do) understand what Cascade means and its relevance in the term Cascading Style Sheets.

If not, see the presentation I give called "The Great Cascade: Just Where Are The Style Sheets In A Web Page?"

What this comes down to is that DW generates CSS in a way that makes it difficult to understand and impossible to edit.

To complicate things even more, it does not understand the principle of inheritance. If, for example, you write a style rule - such as defining the background color of the body (the entire page) as blue - that style rule (blue) will descend to all of the body's children - like <p>, <div>, <ul> and so on. XHTML is just like a family. Tags inherit style characteristics from their parents. That's very cool, but DW is totally clueless on how this works.

Because DW can't do the thinking - only you can think - it falls far short as an effective CSS tool. Hence, I get phone calls and emails that lead to projects to fix the uneditable CSS goop generated by DW.

I bet you thought that all you'd need to do is use DW to make great web pages and never learn a lick about CSS. Quit swallowing Adobe's hype. We're 20 years away from Dreamweaver really being a dream.

You don't want to make messy web pages. You want gorgeous web design and the best way to manage your design is to lay off DW as a CSS authoring tool. Just learn CSS already!!

It's very rewarding to learn. You'll get the kind of control you crave when making web pages. As for where to learn CSS, I think I know the answer to that one!!

Take Joy Of Code:Practical CSS