CSS and Web Editors

In the realm of GUI HTML editors, CSS is a step backwards. Don’t get me wrong: I love CSS, but the Dreamweaver MX graphical interface for CSS is atrocious. I’m mostly self-taught in regards to CSS, but I’ve been using DWMX as my tool. Unfortunately, MX simply gives you a slice of the available options but is by no means complete. My main complaint is that the interface is simply difficult to use. It’s like we jumped back 20 years to data entry screens. It’s time consuming and non-intuitive. Equally problematic is that DW doesn’t display pages with CSS correctly. It’s often way, way off compared to how Netscape and IE displays the page so the visual editing portion of DW then becomes useless and your stuck with the code view … and then, why use DW anyway if you’re just editing code?

I’m really hoping that this is a temporary situation. CSS is at the forefront of modern web design, and one would hope that Macromedia will significantly improve the CSS support in the next version of DW. They changed virtually nothing from DW 4.0 to DW MX in regards to CSS except that now it’s a little easier to directly edit the code.

Having come from print design myself, I’m a big fan of WYSIWYG. In the web realm, they’ve made a lot of progress. I used to use GoLive 4.0 and loved it, but moved to DW 3.0 a few years ago because that is what was becoming standard at the university. In that time, GoLive has more or less disappeared, and Dreamweaver has become king of the hill. DW MX is the first version that has a halfway decent GUI. The intergration of the graphical and code views is something that GoLive had years ago, so it’s nice to see it arrive in the basic DW product.

In the past year or so, I’ve become more tolerant of the code view. I did a lot of programming as a kid and in college, but once the web came around, my feeling was that it was first and foremost a graphical medium. In my opinion, a graphical medium deserves graphical editors. The print side is fairly well developed. Products like Xpress and InDesign feature sophisticated tools for manipulating the printed page. And Photoshop and Freehand are powerful photo and illustration editors. The web side though is still in development.

Part of the challenge is the speed at which the technology changes. HTML has become XHTML. CSS is gaining speed. And of course ASP, PHP, etc. add another dimension. So DW, while being a graphical editor, is essentially a programming tool: You plug in the elements and it writes the code. With CSS, Macromedia hasn’t really thought through how to approach this graphically; it is in the land of nuts and bolts.

As I increasingly create web content, both at home and here at the university, I am using the code view much more often. I’ve made the switch to sites based on XHTML and CSS, and that was the right thing to do. But now the tools need to catch up with the technology.