The Demise of Dreamweaver Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

Thursday, 04 June 2009 04:56

A recent article by Tom Arah at the PC Pro blog took a provocative stand, to say the least. In the article, I?m sorry but Dreamweaver is dying, Tom lays out an argument that static HTML pages are no longer a viable way to publish to the Web, and with their demise Dreamweaver may very well die right along with it. In its place he sees a place only for content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. In a follow-on article, A nice chat with Adobe about Dreamweaver, he discusses his conclusions with Devin Fernandez, senior product manager for web products at Adobe. In the end, his opinion remains the same; Dreamweaver and the kind of static HTML it produces is a process that is due to fade away, undone by the rise of dynamic web publishing methods. He even goes so far in his conclusion to the first article to say:

"If you are a Dreamweaver user don?t bother upgrading to the latest version or exploring Adobe?s feeble attempts to graft end user content contribution onto Dreamweaver. Instead save your money and invest your time in getting to grips with the real future of web design: server-based content management systems."

Well. To say that I disagree with Mr. Arah would be a bit of an understatement as well. Let's take a look at some of his central arguments and see where he raises valid points and where his thinking goes off the rails.

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