I hate with a passion the bad markup Adobe has contributed with by making [some high number] of users create websites using Dreamweaver (yes people are using in company settings, even on corporate sites).
I decided to try Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 because heck – it’s free (30-day trial) and who knows I might get pleasently surprised. There’s definitely been an improvement; no longer are the markup looking like a battlefield (of which you lost of course), but they still include inline width and height attributes wherever they can. The parser also doesn’t seem particularly smart when it adds new automatic css rules, for instance it doesn’t add the rules to existing rulesets with an identical path.
Of course I had to take the bull by it’s horns and see if they had fixed the nightmarish markup generated when creating/modifying tables and believe it or not they have improved it – somewhat. When you change a cell’s width only the first cell (in the markup) changes width value, thus no more unecessary duplication.
All though when I changed the height of the most bottom row the height was set on the cell/row instead of the table so at some point I was unable to make the table smaller. Or was it the other way around. Blah, no matter.
That’s when I closed Dreamweaver and decided not to use it again (maybe in 10-20 years?).
To be fair I’m mostly picking on the visual tools – and what kind of markup they create. Personally I think they’re not yet at the level where they should be: CSS should be generated using style tags and there should be a much more sofisticated system for creating CSS rules instead of inline formatting.
Got a different opinion? Go ahead and speak your mind 🙂
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