I hate Dreamweaver. It seems everyone and their dog can use Dreamweaver these days, and that’s great.  For me, this is all about the fight against Dreamweaver and most IDE’s.  Did I just say most?  I meant just about every IDE out there, especially most mainstream IDE’s like Dreamweaver.

To set things clear, this article is also about the general concept of most IDE’s in general.  Why did I pick Dreamweaver?  Well, apparently Arthur Kay doesn’t think I can possibly out-hate Dreamweaver more than him.  I’m here to prove him wrong and claim my delicious beer.  Yes, Art, I want that beer.  That, oh, so delicious Dreamweaver-free beer.

Now that you understand where I’m coming from, let’s begin. It’s clear, I hate Dreamweaver. Let’s start off with the word “hate”, as defined in the Merrian-Webster dictionary.

\ˈhāt\ : intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.

That about sums up how I feel; intense hostility. I most definitely feel hostile towards Dreamweaver, I’ve gone through the trouble of expressing how much I hate it in the form of writing. That takes patience, but mostly anger.

So, I hate Dreamweaver, but why?

• Embraces poor code.

  I hate how Dreamweaver does this, just about every WSIWYG editor does. I have yet to see such an editor create external stylesheets. I’ll hand it to recent versions of Dreamweaver for creating and managing styles for you, but I really don’t see much of an advantage over hand coding. However good the style management may be, Dreamweaver is still encouraging bad practice. I hate opening up sources and finding styles embedded in each and every page!

• Why use it

  I just don’t understand why anyone would use an IDE that does anything more than syntax completion, code hinting, and manage/deploy versions. It just doesn’t make sense, with the way Dreamweaver is designed, if I have to use it, I only use it as a text editor. Seriously, for the longest time my editor of choice was Notepad++. Even Adobe removed portions of WYSIWYG from recent releases of Dreamweaver. I’m convinced even Adobe employees hate old versions of Dreamweaver.

• W3C Incompatible

  Even if most of Dreamweaver (in recent versions) complies with W3C standards, the last time I looked some CSS properties list weren’t standard. If the IDE is going to suggest properties, at least alert me it’s not cross compatible. It’s terrible to use non-standard CSS if you don’t know what you’re doing and Dreamweaver needs to stop encouraging it.

• The same DOCTYPE!?.

  For some weird reason, Dreamweaver doesn’t prompt you on the DOCTYPE. I hate how Dreamweaver just assumes you want xHTML, why? Maybe I want HTML 4.01 transitional or even HTML5. I think you can configure Dreamweaver to use a different DOCTYPE, but what’s the point of doing that every time you want to switch. I can’t stand how Dreamweaver does that, I want to chose my own DOCTYPE!

• WYSIWYG + Dynamic Pages, Not Happening

  I hate that all WYSIWYG editors just don’t work with dynamic content. It’s just not possible. Even worse, the WYSIWYG doesn’t render the same as any browser. Try working with “fixed” positioning, not gonna happen. Yes, Dreamweaver, your WYSIWYG editor sucks just like every other and I hate it.

• It doesn’t always work

  Just like any other software, the more it does the more opportunity for issues. Take Jeremy Butler, for instance, he’s been complaining about how he hates when Dreamweaver just errors out seemingly without a reason. It seems it was caused by Javascript syntax parsing, but who knows. For me that’s another reason to hate large IDE’s.

There you have it, just a few of many reasons I hate Dreamweaver just like every other IDE. All I really need is a nice text editor; I do like code completion, but I have yet to find one that works flawlessly with all libraries and languages I work with. You may be thinking “We know why you hate Dreamweaver, but you must be using some IDE”. Well, yes, I do use an IDE. My favorites to date are Aptana, Xcode, Coda, and Notepad++. I use Visual Studio just for ease of .Net development. Don’t even get me started on why I hate .Net. Do you hate Dreamweaver too? Feel free to join in the ranting below. I don’t mind discussing more reasons for why I hate Dreamweaver.

Care to keep reading?  Here’s some related links, see why Dreamweaver is driving other people mad too!

• I Hate Dreamweaver Facebook Group
• List of [old] Dreamweaver alternatives and missing features
• List of open-source alternatives to Dreamweaver