It is easier to build tables on Dreamweaver than using notepad or whatever-it-is..

Otherwise, DW GUI sucks (I say it honestly)

The main reason people make disparaging remarks about Dreamweaver stems from their ignorance. They can’t be bothered to learn how to use it properly.

Dreamweaver is easily abused, but so can any application.

It’s the best tool I’ve used for CSS management:

Right-click a CSS rule on the ‘Rule’ list, to go straight to rule code.

Drag ‘n’ Drop, rule order.

Automatically warns on CSS Browser compatibility issues (90% IE6, which we’ll be able to ignore very soon).

Drop-down list of CSS Classes, that can easily be attached to HTML elements.

Ignore those who are ignorant I say!

I agree with all that you said. We should all use what we’re comfortable with and not what the “gurus” advocate. My point is, that for someone who’s starting in the coding realm, DW isn’t the best option in terms of what I’ve said above and even for “how-to-code-properly” because all the distractions ( functions ) the tool has.

On a side note, I to use fireworks for my web design. It’s a matter of using the right tool for the right job.

Because it’s a tool I’m very proficient at and am comfortable using. The price is very low when looked at from a time-savings perspective. The difference between DW and something like Coda is only $300US. That’s less than a day’s worth of hourly wage coding. So I’ll see a return on my investment quickly.

As I mentioned in a previous comment, you can use multiple other tools (even many free ones) but there is a time savings to:
1. knowing the software and being comfortable with it
2. having all your tools in one package.

With that said, I’ll also admit I use Fireworks for my web graphics versus Photoshop. My time is worth money, the tools that allow me to work the quickest allow me to make more money doing what I do.

I’m glad to see that a lot of people use and like DW, I wish they’d be more upfront about it when talking among peers. I even received some comments to this article via email because some people didn’t want to make it public they like/use it :(

The first week there I was crying I didn’t have Dreamweaver. You can check files in/out, easily scan multi-column page layouts in split-view then save and FTP into the staging environment all in DW. DW has file synchronization as well in the FTP so it’s warned me many times when I’ve updated personal projects at work and forgotten to pull down the changes at home and nearly overwritten them.

My first full-time design job was using Frontpage when I first started. Luckily I convinced them in the first week to switch to Dreamweaver. I agree that Frontpage/Dreamweaver association forever tarnished DW reputation. FP was a true abomination.

One thing I do like and find extremely useful is in Find/Replace you can click on the results and it will open the file and take you directly to the search result. I’m constantly doing sitewide Find/Replaces on sites with thousands of files and it saves me massive amounts of time.

BTW, spellchecking is under Text-Check Spelling, been there as long as I can remember. You can do the whole document or highlighted sections.

There’s a lot I DON’T use in Dreamweaver, but the things I do use, I use on a daily basis and having it all in one program simplifies things greatly.

An AS3-developer at my company tried to convince us to use Eclipse, but for all it virtues, it still looks and feels like and java-application from 98 so that was a big nono…

And, as I said, in the end it’s the output that counts, and i guess that’s why ppl tend to frown upon wysiwyg-editors, since the code generated by the programs usually is (or at least was) utter sheit…

That being said, I think everyone should use the tool they are comfortable with, and looking down on collegues tool of choice is downright arrogant.

Thank you for an excellent blog by the way!