[cynicalsecurity]

No, no one is using it. It never was a go-to tool even back then. I feel old by just remembering it.

Dreamweaver solved no one's problems.

1) Regular users didn't need it: they couldn't use it for publishing their web-sites anyway. They quickly just switched to social media for publishing their content.

2) Dreamweaver was not a great tool for professionals too. Its code editor was not convenient and overall the program felt really poor in features. It never could catch up with new features of web. Besides, no one creates whole pages and Dreamweaver didn't support dividing a page into parts like header, main part, menu, articles footer etc, as far as I remember. This would be a way too much complicated task to implement.

So it was just a tool for students. If you were learning HTML, it was a fine tool to learn it. That's it. It was never used in real work.

The name "Dreamweaver" is really cool though, I must give them credit. It sounds even way too cool for such a simple program as it was. It should have been used for an iconic film or a video game instead.

Unexpected bottom line: do we need something like Dreamweaver which wouldn't suck? Yes. Figma got so successful because it allowed creating prototypes and was solving real life problems. Now a new program like Dreamweaver could solve the problem of quick prototyping and generating HTML code for something like React components.

Would it be a complicated app? Yes. Would it require a lot of programming? Yes. Would it immediately bring money? No. So currently it's probably won't be a good idea to work on it.

You can create something like a visual editor module for HTML pages or react components to be used in modern IDEs. Maybe even just by embedding a non-read only WebView with some cleverly butchered developer tools and sell that module to companies for a cheap subscription.

[theseanz]

> It was never used in real work

Does this mean I need to return all my paychecks from 2004 to 2007?

[hilbert42]

"Would it be a complicated app? Yes. Would it require a lot of programming? Yes. Would it immediately bring money? No. So currently it's probably won't be a good idea to work on it."

Consider that web browsers essentially do the reverse of HTML editors such as Dreamweaver. Moreover, all current web browsers do a much better job at rendering web pages from HTML than do WYSIWYG editors do at turning text into HTML.

I don't think many appreciate how sophisticated web browsers are these days. Now consider that browsers such as Firefox and Chromium are open source, their code could be used to develop HTML editors.

The question I keep asking is why aren't there a plethora of HTML editors out there that harness the algorithms these browsers already use for their own development.

As you suggest, producing a good HTML editor is very hard work, if it weren't then there'd be many good editors out there but there aren't. Take wordprocessors with a 'save as HTML' option and one will find the code they produde ranges from almost unusable to abominable.

Same goes for email editors that produce HTML-formatted emails. For example, Thunderbird has about the worst HTML editor around, it's brain-dead and full of bugs, and it's been like that for decades. It's as if those at Mozilla are terrified to touch it for fear that they'll kill it altogether.

Now keep in mind that Thunderbird actually uses the Firefox engine so what's going on here? With Thunderbird is the browser code completely divorced from its email editor?

OK, you may well say that's just how is it with Thunderbird, the editor evolved separately to its rendering engine. I'll then say take a good look at BlueGriffon which is quite an excellent HTML editor based on Firefox (despite the fact that it's awkward to use and hasn't been updated in ages). How come its developer can produce good HTML whereas Thunderbird's developers don't seem to have a clue?

Also, how relevant to this discussion is the fact that BlueGriffon's development has ceased: http://bluegriffon.org/. What's the actual reason for the developer ceasing development (there's likely more than he's stating on his webpage)?

Right, perhaps somewhere in all that comment lies the path to actual truth of the matter—that is, how difficult it is to actually make a decent HTML editor?

I've been on the lookout for a good open-source HTML editor for years and I've yet to see a decent discussion, analysis or exposé of the subject. Why not?

It's still impossible to sort out whether the demand for a decent HTML editor just isn't there or whether it's a too bigger project and not worth the effort.

I wish those who are truly in the know would put this matter to rest. Many of us who don't wish to delve deep into web browser/editor code would love some answers.