girlgeek

It was strange, but I was messing around with some CSS at home the other day, and I came to a realization.  I started my web design career with a combination of photoshop and notepad, then moved up to BBEdit, and then got GoLive as part of first CS and the CS2.  I’m biased because I’m used to writing my code in GoLive.  I will honestly admit that I’ve never actually tried to use the buttons and tool sets to attempt to build a website without actually writing it by hand.  In this respect, it makes very little difference whether I use GoLive (which I use at home, still working in CS2), or Dreamweaver, which is what there is at work, CS4 and occasionally CS3.  The one thing that really defines them for me is how they deal with CSS.  Dreamweaver has some funky little “oh, we’ve added support to help teach you how to use it!” tool inspectory thingy.  Yuck.  The moment the classes become longer than, say, ten letters (I’m approximating), you can’t see the end of the name, and therefore may not be actually changing what you think you’re changing (prime suspect–anyone ever tried to use the Dreamweaver CSS panel in conjunction with a pre-built Spry widget?  The program isn’t doing it job if it’s easier to just edit the sheet by hand than try to read the “tools”).  

On the other hand,  I sat down with a significantly older version of GoLive, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the CSS was organized into a nice list with a set of inspector-like buttons intuitively letting me deal with individual attributes.  Did I mention that I was slogging through someone else’s code, and it wasn’t very clean?  Looking at the straight text, I was not excited.  Switching to the graphic interface in GoLive…and suddenly it was smooth sailing.  

I think that I am biased simply because I’ve been working in GoLive longer; because it actually acts like an Adobe product and I can apply my Photoshop knowledge effectively.  On the other hand, Dreamweaver is consistently presented as a professional graphical web design tool, which it clearly is not.  Sure, you could graphically create a bunch of tables, or you could start with a template and attempt to intuitively change the longest, most opaque class names ever, but when it comes down to it, you have to be able to read the html to do anything really effective.  GoLive has never really been presented to me that way, although I know they’d made some attempt to include buttons and so forth in an attempt to accomplish something similar.  i guess it all comes down to mis-set expectations.  But when it comes to CSS….GoLive has my vote all the way.  

All of this happy gloating about how much better GoLive still deals with CSS makes it all the more depressing to me that there is no GoLive CS4.  I can only hope that eventually we will see the good parts of both programs smerged into one, instead of a ploy to purchase design market share without innovation.

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