Dreamweaver, gaaaah. Hey, at least it was better than Frontpage, which took a much faster nosedive into enshittification after Microsoft bought it and ruined the absolute shit out of it. Slightly better. Like, it had its own shitty inline styling that would get tangled up in itself and youβd have to clean it up manually, but at least it wasnβt Microsoft styling.
Yeah, Fireworks compression was great! There was a period of time where I only used it to export jpeg, Photoshopβs did suck in comparison.
I didnβt know Frontpage was ever not a Microsoft product. It was on all our computers at school when I was in high school. When I first started making webpages with it it seemed cool, but as I learned more I was shocked at how bad it was. Still, it was just playing around in there that introduced me to how HTML worked, so Iβll give it a little credit for introducing me to the web.
You never forget your first WYSIWYG HTML editor. Mine was Adobe Pagemill, which doesnβt exist anymore but was also purchased from another software company. Ok, I shit on Frontpage a lot, maybe Iβve been too harsh. Those early WYSIWYGs helped us take those first few baby steps, and thatβs so important in the learning process. Like, Iβm just now realizing this, but I think I owe my web development career to Pagemill, lol. That little program (as we used to call them, you remember) made it easy for me, I was like βuhβ¦I think I can do this!β
Ugh, you just unlocked a core memory: Every element is assigned a class, but they are unique to the element, thus defeating the whole damn point of the class functionality?!
Oh jeez, itβs coming back to me now. Yikes, what a terrible use of classnames. Iβm sure they thought they had a good reason for it, but to me itβs kind of a failure of a feature implementation if most of your userbase ends up not just ignoring it but outright deleting it because itβs useless to them and just creates clutter.
Dreamweaver did have one saving grace. It had this code editor cleanup mode that removed empty and redundant tags, and at one point they added a neat option to remove Word document tags! From what I remember, it was pretty accurate and helped clean up a lot of shit. Unfortunately, it was unable to clean up code that it created itself.
Ahhh! I had a client a hundred years ago that did a βsave as webpageβ from a Word doc and wanted me to clean it upβ¦ Iβm like, βitβll be easier to throw it out and start overβ, so thatβs what i did. Then i charged her for the time it would have taken, had i bothered to try and clean up the code. She was happy to pay it!?
