Teaching Web Design: The Redline Document May 15

Filed under Design, School, Web Design by Chad | 4 comments

I’ve been teaching web design for the last 8 years at Bradley University. In the course, I focus on web standards and the design process with my students. I’d like to share an idea I had some time ago and have been using for the last several semesters with some pretty good success. This concept is called, “The Redline Document”. I’ll explain it in just a moment, but first a little background.

In producing a website design, there are replicable steps you should take in order to ensure success, this is a “Process”, if you will. This process should be sharable, transferrable to others on your team and easy to implement. Eventually, the steps should become like second nature to you and your team members. Hopefully, at some point, anyone on your team will be able to step in and take over at virtually any step in the process. It’s crucial for any company that produces creative and technical solutions to adhere to a process in order to build a business and elevate beyond the status of simply being a “job shop” or “making ends meet”. At the Iona Group, we use such a process called “The 4D Process”. You can learn more about it here.

I teach an abbreviated form of the process we use at The Iona Group to my students in my course at Bradley. This simplified process is easy to grasp after a couple quick projects and works great for students, as it allows for a lot of input over the course of the effort. This works for academic settings where the instructor or peers need to offer critique at key project milestones, but it also transfers well to the professional world where you may distributing the workload and looking for stakeholder approvals. In client work, I strongly believe it is best to engage the clients early and often in decisions that affect the project. Each successive step in the process should be a minor reveal, not a massive “AHA!”, IMHO.

Some example design phase deliverables in a web design project would be as follows (I’m skipping past the strategy and definition dleiverables in this post, maybe we’ll cover those some other time):

  • Sketch
  • Wireframe
  • Moodboard
  • Mockup

Those would be documents you could share with your client and get feedback, critique, suggestions, and other stakeholder input. There is one deliverable missing from that list that I have coined “The Redline“. The Redline is not a document shared with the client, but rather a document used internally to ensure the designer, developers, copywriters and SEO experts are all on the same page when it comes to hierarchy, standards implementation and the details of templating the website. This document also serves a valuable purpose to junior level team members in how to structure their efforts. It’s basically a webpage equivalent to an engineer’s CAD drawing of an engine or other mechanical part. In our class we create the Redline document after the mockup phase, but it’s easy to see that there could be a lot of value in creating a Redline as part of the wireframing process. This document works well in a web design class setting to help teach students about page structure, semantics and design hierarchy.

This document also reinforces an oft quoted Zeldman-ism:

Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.

I have produced these documents in the past using a printout and a fine-point red Sharpie marker, but the example here was made using Omnigraffle Pro. So, let’s see an example of “The Redline” (click the image for a larger view):

Essentially every element on the page is bounded by a red box, and in each box, the HTML tag that will be used in the creation of the page’s structure is clearly listed. Yes, I realize this should be elementary for an advanced web designer; and yes, once you become adequately skilled you may not need this document. However, for a junior level developer, or for a distributed team that relies heavily on standards based SEO and proper marked up pages, this document has a high amount of value. What benefits does it bring to such a team? Consider these:

  • Prevents HTML “Writer’s Block” – There is no question that junior web designers struggle at where to start once they open a text editor. How will the nav bar be structured? How about that sidebar? What constitutes an H2, an H3, etc?
  • Puts Proper Emphasis On Page Structure – One of the very best ways to SEO optimize is to start out with good bones. By looking at how your content is placed in the page you can make sure that tag weight won’t interfere with proper indexing or page accessibility. Sure, it’s great to have a website with a pretty face, but without good bones, you’re never going to have a design that truly performs. The Redline forces you to think critically about how your page content and structure live together.
  • Separates Design Strategy from Design Production – Let’s face it. Thinking is expensive. You may only have a couple of high end designers capable of producing scalable, SEO friendly standards based designs. You probably have a much larger base of coders capable of writing HTML with some guidance. This allows the team to divide and conquer, with individuals adding value where they can really shine.
  • Eliminates Divitis Before It Begins – Unfocused HTML writing results in poorly formed markup. No question about it. Writing without a plan is a recipe for disaster. This document is that plan.
  • Documents the Design for Historical Purposes/Recordkeeping – As a website ages, the pages get edited, content maintenance systems get patched, templates are tweaked, etc. a website can get rickety. The redline document allows a team member to perform a development/design soft reset down the road. If you want to rollback the site later to the SEO optimized version that everyone agreed on, unless you have pristine document history or version control systems in place you may have difficulty reinstating the original template. The redline will at least allow you to recreate it with minimal fuss.
  • Reduces Coding Time – No question about it, it’s easier to “restructure your page” semantically via diagrams than it is to rewrite HTML time and time again. Just like wireframes help short-circuit the “Photoshop Mockup Death Spiral”, this document helps accelerate the development phase.
  • Establishes and Document Naming Convention for Classes and Elements Ahead of Time – When adding the ids and classes to the document, you are in essence documenting the framework for the CSS and the JavaScript to be integrated with the designs. This really will make sure a distributed team is all on the same page (pun intended).
  • Empowers the Design Team To Help Developers Adhere to Standards – I’m not naming names, but I have come into a number of situations where backend developers have been entrusted to write the markup for the web designs they have been provided. These developers mean well, and can write great SQL and business logic, but page templating isn’t there thing. As anyone knows, a poorly structured DOM is going to produce invalid HTML pages. Invalid HTML documents are NOT going to be cross browser compatible.

So, there you go. I hope this info helps you either learn web design for the first time, or maybe even enhance the process you are using at work to help maximize productivity and increase your overall web design quality. Are you using a similar document in your process? I’d like to hear about how you are implementing planning documents like this to jumpstart your designs.

Look who RIM bought… December 2

Filed under Fun, Industry, mobile by Chad | 1 comment

Anyone thinking RIM is standing still, wel… look no further. This Swedish outfit, TAT, just go picked up by the Blackberry maker. This should give them a much needed shot in the arm in the UI department from a creativity standpoint.

via Wired.

Does HTML5 need JavaScript2? May 8

Filed under Flash, Industry, Web Design by Chad | 23 comments

More Cowbell
As a long-time web designer, I have had lots of love affairs with various technologies over the years. GIFBuilder, BBEdit, Photoshop image-slicing, tables, HTML and CSS, Quicktime, VR, Shockwave, JavaScript, Flash 4, Flash 5, Flash MX2004, Actionscript 3, Flash Video, JQuery, DOM Storage… the list goes on and on.

Some of these have been long forgotten and swept under the rug of ancient things in my brain like stuff I learned in my chemistry classes or college psych 101. Other things churn, get their lives extended and get refreshed again and again. With our recent foray in mobile, one of those things for me right now is JavaScript. Often maligned, sometimes heralded, it’s obvious people have lots of opinions on what is one of the most widely deployed programming languages on the web.

After leaving my first job at Rollingstone.com (which consisted of making a lot of Flash minisites and games using Flash 4 and Flash 5), I renewed my interest in JavaScript and the dynamic DOM (I think it was called DHTML at the time). I was very concerned about SEO and machine readability around this time, so I stopped doing a lot of Flash for a couple years. Finally, around the time that Actionscript 2 came out, I started to like JavaScript less than I had previously and also started doing a lot of freelance game development for the web using Flash. Browsers were somewhat inconsistent in their rendering/parsing of it, it lacked the basic OOP and syntactical sugar of AS2 or even PHP for that matter, and debugging it was tough (Firebug wasn’t around yet). Shortly thereafter, JS frameworks like Prototype and JQuery began to emerge, making writing JS a lot less painful. It didn’t really help you get around some of the advanced development issues like true OOP or native data types like JSON, but it was certainly better than writing raw JS.

After AS3 hit the scene in 2006, it was tough to get me to want to develop anything of real complexity with JavaScript given just how awesome it was finally having an ECMAScript based language like AS3 that used strict typing, offered true OOP and provided compile time errors. Add to that, the fact that IE6 made dependable JavaScript a crap shoot compared to Firefox and there is no wonder why Flash enjoyed its heydays from 2004 to 2009 or so.

Fast forward to today and the constant bickering between anybody on the web about the slow death of flash or the rise of HTML5 or need for standards or whatever the tech press or bloggers will have you believe about what is going on behind closed doors between Google, Adobe, Apple and MS about the web’s next steps in media design and development tech and you still have to wonder… how will games, deep experiences and the like be built in HTML5?

Most demos of the tech are pretty frivolous or only prove that yes, you can play video without Flash. Who cares? Could I use HTML5/JQuery to build Sliderocket? Gmodeler? A top tier experience site for the latest blockbuster movie?

The answer, ‘possibly’… but would it be as easy to build and debug or render as fast as using Flash/ActionScript? Most likely, no.

Some of that has to do with the tools. Flash is made to create rich spectacles complete with detailed animations, rich interactions and precise graphics. It’s over 10 years old and is pretty mature. CSS (even CSS3) and the average rendering engines in a browser just can’t match up to it in power, speed, display uniformity across platforms and overall flexibility. But furthermore, building rich apps in JavaScript 1.x is still a pain. Some IDEs are better than others at it, but the language is still pretty much crap for heavy duty coding. Runtime errors galore, esoteric debuggers, a lack of strict typing and advanced data types in general, no formalized approach to MVC/ design patterns… the list goes on and on. Why are we going back to what many developers would call an inferior technology to Flash or even Silverlight. The drive is largely mobile, but there are some other politics at play as well.

When you look at the press coming out, or get phone calls from clients requesting HTML5 apps, alarm bells start going off in my mind. How are we going to handle this transition to a post Flash world when device manufacturers like Apple seem to be forcing us to use a hammer and chisel to produce pale imitations of sites that we built two years ago using great tools? Is the Flash platform perfect? No, but it’s better than pretty everything else we have tried so far for building examples like the ones I pointed out above.

What are the next steps? Well, to see some of the docs coming out of the standards crowd and the browser developers, not much. Ugh. If my tools of choice (Flash and Flex) are really going to lose ubiquity in the player realm, marginalizing their effectiveness due to lack of ubiquity, then please at least give us some tools to build JavScript apps in that are at least as good as what we already have. Get JavaScript 2 out there, please and make it good, not hobbled like the next gen of ECMAScript looks to be. And please, bring hardware accelerated SVG rendering to all browsers, not just IE.

This is not meant to be a “HTML5 sucks” or a “Flash rocks” post… there are plenty of those already. I am interested in hearing what you think though… Does HTML5 need a better DOM scripting partner if it is going to take over for Flash? What does an ideal HTMl5 authoring tool look like? Do these questions matter as much as I think they do to the average designer/developer?

links for 2010-02-07 February 7

Filed under From Delicious by Chad | 0 comments

An SVN, Testing Process and Continuous Integration Primer for Flash Designers/Devs January 22

Filed under Flash, Flex, Work by Chad | 4 comments

Alright… so unless you you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple years, you know that TDD, Source Control and Build Automation have fully hit the Flash design and development scene. It seems as though everyone is talking about it. A lot. And then commenting on it. A lot. (more…)

Your Web/Social Media Resolutions for 2009 January 3

Filed under Industry, Web Design by Chad | 3 comments

Everyone makes resolutions for the New Year, right? Quit smoking, eat better, be nicer, be more productive, etc etc. How about resolutions for your web presence and activity? What things should be considering doing, or STOP doing online to maximize 2010? After all, it is the year we make contact, so when the monolith comes calling, you want to be ready! Here’s what I am planning on working on:

  • Understanding Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin Technical integration points better and using them! – Yes, all these sites can speak to each other. But should they? And should they always be talking to each other? Probably not always. I need to explore a more friends and family friendly approach to sharing my statuses via Twitter and Facebook. I frequently leave my non-geek friends scratching their heads. Hmm.
  • Building out some more web-service based mashups – In 2008 I built a lot of mashups. Some for clients, most for fun. In 2009 at Iona, we’ve built a few site features out for clients leveraging various web services, but by and large it was pretty quiet for me personally on this front. I need to get back into it!
  • Reskinning my blog – I’m coming on year 3 of this design. Time for something new.
  • Refining my following list on Twitter and building some more lists – I think I over followed when I joined Twitter and I’m working to rectify that. Too many auto replying bots, too many marketing feeds, on and on. Also in the second half of 2009, Twitter launched lists. I have made a couple of them so far, but as they continue to build out this feature I intend to use it.
  • Using Social Media Better When at Conferences and Events – Nothing is more annoying in a Twitter feed or your Facebook newsfeed than seeing a constant bombardment of updates from someone at a conference that feels as though every utterance coming from the speaker they are watching needs to be shared to all from the mountaintops. I have done this more than once. Not happening this year. For a great list of other things you should stop Twittering about, check this out.

So what are you focusing on this year? May I make a few suggestions, if you have chosen any? Here we go.

  • Build Something – For Real – Stop being a flapping head social media douche and really make something! Some videos, a real website without your stupid grinning mug on it, an app, a mashup, an experience. Sure, maybe this sounds cynical, and maybe it’s a little bit much, but I’m just so tired of seeing the same old tired routine by “strategists”. Nearly all of ‘em just parrot whatever Seth Godin, Gary V, Chris Brogan or Jason Fried say and virtually all of ‘em are actually contributing very little to the conversation or the larger landscape.
  • Stop Talking About “Maxmizing Your Personal Brand’s Reach by Microblogging”
    – Or whatever other crap your inner social media kissass self thinks will get you some sucker to part with their money. At this point, major corporations have “social media policies”. Little companies either get it or they probably never will. Where does this leave you? Well, if you were a “web designer” before all of this, you probably still are now. If you were a talentless hanger-on-er before… well, you can probably guess.
  • Strongly question or reconsider what your “SEO Expert” is suggesting.
    - Do they Have your web copy looking like it was written by a 3rd grader? They are doing it wrong. With properly written markup and a decent product message, you don’t need to Google bomb your way to the top of the rankings. Certainly, writing repetitive boring copy may have its advantages (it’s easy and doesn’t take much creativity) and can sometimes get you higher rankings, but at what cost… You ultimately devalue your organic search results by not giving the user and deeper content once they visit your site.
  • Don’t Build a Microsite without a Media Buying Plan and determing the Metrics Package and how it’s going to be implemented. – You would not believe how often new microsites sites pop up for products and services if you are not involved in this industry. Weekly, there are dozens featured on Marketing and Advertising blogs. So often when you visit the site and poke around the source code, you notice there is not an analytics package in place. Unreal. What a waste of money. Make a pledge to your budget to not launch a site without measuring how it’s working.
  • If You Don’t Have a Business Twitter or Facebook Account, You Absolutely Need One – With these sites drawing the type of traffic they do, if your business is not on them, you are really missing out. Even if you are a straight up B2B services company and do very little public marketing, you can find value in being on these sites. If nothing else, you should be there in order to at least protect your brand name in the space and prevent it being hijacked.

Top Webdesign/development Stories – 2009 December 23

Filed under Industry, Web Design by Chad | 6 comments

Ahh… that time of the year again. Time for everyone’s top ten end of the year lists. I used to write ones for record albums or movies, videos games etc. Here I am taking a slightly different slant. I haven’t ever put one together focused on the industry that I work in, the web/rich internet app design space. This is my attempt at that. These aren’t really in an order or “awesomeness” or anything… I welcome comments and your additions. Please feel free to shoot down my suppositions or add more!

  • Google Releases Galore – The list was staggering. I couldn’t possibly get them all here, but some notables were Voice, Chrome, Chrome OS, new Android devices, Wave, and major revisions to the Maps and Earth APIs. A really strong list of stuff, and virtually all of it is highly useful and usable. They are definitely on a roll now. Are they making good on their promise to “not be evil”? It can’t be easy with that many outlets.
  • Twitter Goes Main-Mainstream! – When Twitter’s publicized race between CNN and AK to reach a million followers hit the mainstream press, that was a wake up to virtually every media outlet out there. Twitter was for real. Now, you can’t even watch your local affiliate, pick up a small town paper or even talk to your aunt without them telling you to follow them on Twitter. Numerous high profile magazine covers on Fortune and other “old media” stalwarts have signaled a changing of the guard, if you will.
  • People Finally Notice Facebook Privacy Settings – Facebook has taken some heat in the past for Beacon and various other advertising techniques they have employed to provide users with targeted content. With later 2009′s changes to the privacy settings page and a note from Zuckerberg to all users about the changes coming soon, it obvious that Facebook’s privacy policy is on a lot of people’s minds. I know I’m not too keen on my wall posts showing up in Google searches or things like that, and I have had a lot of novice FB user friends and relatives ask me how to restrict their content so that only close friends can see things. Now, will this help people finally realize the difference between a private message and a wall post! ;-)
  • Oracle Buyout of Sun – “The database giant swallows the beleagured server system maker”, lots of headlines like that spun out after news of the buyout. Most, if not all missed the simple fact that Sun controls the MySQL Open Source Database. Even the Oracle press release neglects that fact. Since a large majority of notable Open Source projects use MySQL as their database, this has a large number of people in the community apprehensive and readying thei exit strategies. Will it result in a fork of the DB? Stay tuned for this one.
  • Piratebay Rollercoaster – Is it up? Is it down? Are they in jail? Ever since the fateful day when their offices were stormed, the future of the tracker had been in question. They went to trial and all were found guilty, sentenced to jail for a year and a hefty fine was leveed. These convictions are all in appeals now. Then in the summer, Global Gaming Factory X AB announced they were intending to purchase the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world. The deal fell through. In November, they announced they would be shutting down the tracker portion of TPB, stating that it was unnecessary in today’s technological world of torrent distribution. While not technically a “web design topic”, it is important due to the huge amount of content trafficked via Torrents (estimated to account for up to 25% of all bits travelling the tubes.)
  • Flash and Silverlight Play Feature Tag – No question about it, I’ve been tough on Silverlight. It’s too be expected, I’m a long time Mac user and a Flash developer. You couldn’t hardly expect me to jump on the bandwagon of a plug-in that directly competes with my favorite one and doesn’t offer proper development tools on the platform I spend all of my time on. This year at PDC, however, the newest version of Silverlight was unveiled, and man, does it look sweet! It finally is reaching a new feature parity of Flash. It still has no Mac dev tools, though. :-( One thing is certain with all of this, it is really pushing Adobe to make Flash better. The 10.1 player update is bringing massive memory and performance updates and the AIR 2.0 update is bringing a ton of great improvements that will allow it to get a lot more powerful as an app development platform. I’m really happy to see the 2 way competition here, it’s good for everyone on the web.
  • IE9 Announces Hardware Acceleration For The Browser – I have really mixed feelings on this. No actually, I really don’t like it much after further review. The features it will bring to websites are going to be amazing, no doubt, but with it being a Direct X implementation, there is little question that it is going to lead to a further forking of the web. Will anything programmed to take advantage of these IE9 features work on Firefox? Safari, Chrome? Older version of IE? In all likelihood, no. It’s probably not possible.
  • OGG Theora Not Chosen for HTML5′s Media Format – This really put a crimp in HTML5′s ever shining hope. A single, dependable unified system agnostic video codec would be a huge thing for the W3 to get pushed through. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be. At least not right yet. Too many vendors, PC makers, software developers and everyone else are still squabbling for turf. They seem to have hit an impasse at this point, but Mozilla says they have no intention on giving in.
  • Firefox Surpasses Any Single IE Version As The Most Popular Browser - Granted, Firefox has taken a beating lately by Webkit in many performance tests, but the venerable open source browser has recently overtaken IE as the world’s most widely used browser. Most impressive. From the linked article: “As of last week, Firefox 3.5 claimed 21.93% of the market, edging past IE7′s 21.2% share. That said, Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 still collectively hold over 55% of the pie.”
  • With Smartphone Success, Comes a Mobile Version of Everything! – Smartphone market share keeps growing, and with it, mobile data usage. As this market continues to develop, content developers are caught in a very interesting pickle. Create a mobile version of their site for use in the handheld’s browser or build custom tailored apps that accomplish the user’s goals. Seems as though most major providers that can swing it are hedging their bets and building both. ESPN, New York Times, LinkedIn, Twitter, the list goes on and on. Will this continue? It doesn’t seem like a sustainable model to me, with development costs skyrocketing with each new device or platform coming to the markets. Luckily with a great SOA back end, building the new discreet UI for a device is only a marginal cost, relatively speaking, but there is only so far this can go.

So, there you have it. My list, what do you have on yours? I thought I did a pretty job scouring back through my feedreader and various other sources, so I feel pretty good about the list, but I really am looking for insights from others on this topic, too!

DevLearn ’09 Recap – What an Awesome Conference! November 15

Filed under eLearning, Speaking by Chad | 6 comments

I’ve just come home from DevLearn 09. DevLearn is the eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference held in San Jose. This is the second time I have gone there, with this year being the first time I have spoken at the event. It was fantastic fun, holding lots of revelations and surprises. Now, tired but happy, begins the real work. The work of consolidating the notes, following up on the contacts made (some virtual contacts finally made real… I always love when that happens) and trying to make some steps to implement the great ideas I picked up there and talked over with new and old colleagues. (more…)

Two Years In, How Much Do I Miss Not Having Flash On My iPhone? June 28

Filed under Flash, from iPhone by Chad | 8 comments

As most of you who visit here know, I love Flash. Pretty much always have (Flash 3 baby! I ditched Director as quickly as I could.). Sure, we’ve had our differences on and off again over the years, but overall, I continue to be a strong advocates for the technology and love to use it whenever I can on projects for myself and clients. Many of you are probably also are aware that I am also an Apple geek. I have owned over a half dozen Macs myself, and used them long before I was able to get my parents to finally pick one up for me at the end of high school.

Usually, this works out well together. Adobe/Macromedia software pretty much always runs on Apple hardware, with only a few exceptions. A big one happened a couple of years ago with the advent of the iPhone. Here I was, lusting over the phone, but a little heartbroken that the “real internet” as they put it in the first ads for the phone would be missing a key component, Flash. I bought the phone, and yes, at first, I did miss not having Flash on the mobile Safari browser packaged with the phone. More than a little.

Tease after tease, rumor after rumor, here we are, two years later, two major hardware and software revisions later, and still no Flash on the iPhone. The desire to actually have the plugin on the phone, though, at least for me has greatly waned. I’ve simply moved on. It’s not that I wouldn’t welcome it, but with YouTube encoding the videos in H.264 and a lot of other sites out there doing the same, it’s less important to me. Furthermore, many sites have mobile optimized versions of the site available for iPhone users, so browsing the “real internet” isn’t really relevant as an argument anymore. When you add the app store and all the specialized apps for viewing box scores, Twitter, Facebook and the rest, I actually find myself opening Safari less and less with each passing month as an iPhone user.

Beyond the adaptations that content producers have gone through to make their experiences better on the iPhone, there are just as many things that haven’t been “optimized” for the iPhone actually makes the experience even better. In two years surfing using mobile safari, I have yet to be harassed by an annoying Flash banner ad or crazy iframe popover atrocity. That’s nice, if you ask me!

Now, on the flipside, I as a content producer would love to be able to bring some of my creations to the best small screen platform out there, the iPod Touch/iPhone combo. Of course challenges like multitouch, and lack of a hover state for UI feedback among others would need to be worked out. Who wouldn’t love to hack together some sort of GeoLocational Augmented Reality Papervision freak out awesomeness? With the addition or accelorometers, compass, live Google maps and so many other nice things that phone has to offer, building Flash on the phone would be a ton of fun…

But then again, we’d get so many ad banners. ;-) I don’t know about you, but when you sometimes have little control over your mobile bandwidth (eg. dropping to Edge, getting fewer bars than 3, etc), I’m not too keen on giving up those precious bits to some video banner being crammed down my narrow little pipe.

The sheer amount of fun stuff built in Flash would add a ton of great content to the phone, from casual games, to chat apps or even Acrobat Connect. It’s very likely that the App store is the reason that we don’t have Flash, think about how many $0.99 apps would be obsoleted the instant that Flash hit the phone. That is a lot of income that Apple would lose. This is all but obvious, and widely discussed amongst the Apple and Adobe faithful alike.

What are your thoughts? Miss Flash? Not so much? Why is it on virtually every other major mobile platform, but not iPhone? What would you build in Flash for the iPhone that would be a perfect blend of the hardware’s capabilities and the software’s strengths?

From Digg via PCPro: I‚Äôm sorry but Dreamweaver is dying …A Post Worth Reading for a Chuckle March 8

Filed under Digg, Industry, Web Design by Chad | 22 comments

FTA: The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically. Dynamically-generated web applications, from Amazon right down to the humble blog, all offer much more – in-built commenting, voting, RSS feeds, etc Рthan the best sites built on static HTML can ever hope to provide. Read it here.

My take… while I don’t use Dreamweaver, and I don’t like WYSIWYG editors in general, I feel the author is so misguided here in his criticism of the well known Adobe web design tool. He compares Dreamweaver to Drupal and Joomla (two market leading open source content management systems), pointing out that most sites of any scale these days rely on application functionality, ie. RSS, content rating, comments, etc.

Now, while these “Web 2.0″ features certainly are important for user engagement, the actual tool you use for creating the design template used in a site powered by a CMS DOESN’T MATTER! Dreamweaver’s use doesn’t prohibit you from using a CMS, and vice versa. I’m not sure what Tom Arah, the original author of the article, does for a living when he isn’t writing half baked articles for PCPro, but I would be very surprised if it were web design. I can imagine him in a client meeting telling a customer that the Web Server they have doesn’t work with Firefox or that JPGs are obsolete because of iPhones or JQuery is a new database language… Ooh I love unrelated hyperbolic comparisons. Too fun… Let’s try some more. Submit a completely ridiculous web design comparison to my comments here. I need a laugh.

Now, that aside, I do have trouble believing that Dreamweaver is as relevant now as it was a handful of years of ago. With tools like Coda and Expresso out in full force, Eclipse/Aptana offering powerful debugging features and dozens of other free and easy to use text editors out there, I have to think that a WYSIWYG editors appeal is much more limited that it was then. With Web Developer toolbars, Firebug,¬† Safari’s developer toolbar and tons of other design aids for your browser, a design view is pretty pontless IMHO. Simply write your markup, edit or tweak your CSS and tab to a browser window and refresh. Web design, in the world of media production and interactive development is about the easiest deliverable you can preview. What I mean here is that there is virtuall no penalty for tweaking and previewing. Not so in video or compositing, any substantial change requires a new render or RAM preview. This is also not the case in RIA development. You may need to compile your runtime (SWF, Silverlight, etc), upload it to your server and make a tweak to the middleware code, too… You get what I am saying, i think. A design time WYSIWYG offers no real benefit. When you consider that Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG rendering engine is not Gecko, Explorer or Webkit, it becomes clear that WYSIWYG is actually something more like “What You See Is Wishful thinking Ya Goober” – WYSIWtYG!

That said, Dreamweaver’s editor tool isn’t that bad, and when used only a text editor, it’s okay. It is expensive for that purpose alone though, so unless you are using the site management tools (which I don’t care for – it’s FTP is atrocious), or it’s server behaviors (which are pretty limiting and notoriously brittle – not allowing much customization), or it’s AJAX editing (I won’t touch Spry, sorry) then you may just want to move on. So it’s not so much dying, at least not from the perspective mentioned by Tom Arah, it’s just fading into irrelevance due to lack of upkeep.

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