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by Cpoll 33 days ago
I had a similar class where they threatened to fail us if we didn't use Dreamweaver and instead wrote our own html.
5 comments
HerbManic 33 days ago
Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.
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mort96 32 days ago
I never understood Dreamweaver. The first thing it asked me when making a new website was ... what the resolution of my user's screen is? I don't know that!
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jon-wood 32 days ago
Its web development software from the 90s/00s, a period when websites were built by first having a designer meticulously mock everything up in Photoshop on a 640x480 canvas (maybe 800x600 or 1024x768 in later days), that mockup would then be handed over to a web developer (hi, that was me) who would take that mockup, slice it up into a billion little images, and then put them in a wildly complex set of nested HTML tables. The designer would then have a look over it and provide critique on the fact some element was 3px misaligned, or the font size was incorrect.

During this period I was berated by our studio lead for using new fangled technologies like CSS layout that could adapt to different sized screens instead of sticking to the trusty HTML soup Dreamweaver would spit out.

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Jeremy1026 32 days ago
Don't worry, designers still complain about something being 3px off, or a font being weight 700 instead of 800.
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ranger_danger 32 days ago
This is exactly how I remember my early webdev days. Before Dreamweaver we were using NetObjects Fusion.
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bandrami 32 days ago
What were these "troublesome parts"? The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.
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notpushkin 32 days ago
There was a ton of... not exactly footguns, just things to keep in mind if you’ve wanted your site to work as you intended in all browsers. The webcompat nowadays is way better now.

That said, personally I’ve never understood Dreamweaver either. By the time I tried it, I’ve already got used to Notepad++ and writing HTML by hand, so I’ve just treated it as another text editor... and IIRC it just felt way more laggy than Notepad++, with a browser preview panel that took half of my 4:3 display. Maybe I’d discover some cool features if I’ve spent some more time in it? I dunno.

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lolc 32 days ago
> The whole point of HTML's design is that it's incredibly easy for a human to write correctly.

A lot of people (me included) used text editors to write HTML. The process was not easy, and the results mostly not correct.

HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML. This is the first example of HTML from RFC 1866 that laid out HTML 2.0 in 1995:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    <title>Parsing Example</title>
    <p>Some text. <em>&#42;wow&#42;</em></p>
Using an HTML editor was required if you wanted to get anywhere near that standard.
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bandrami 32 days ago
> HTML at the time was intended as an application of SGML

Worse, it was an extended superset (ha!) of SGML. At least 20 years ago, SGML::Parser would reject some valid HTML documents.

That said, it was really easy to type correctly in a text editor (especially compared to actual SGML), particularly one that indented and matched tags for you.

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reddalo 32 days ago
Just like AI vibecoded websites... Good luck understanding the code when the AI bubble explodes and you can't afford the insane price that AI will have by then.
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layla5alive 33 days ago
Was that class taught by a certain woman who had a business making websites, per-chance?
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dcow 33 days ago
You just described my teacher, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t go to the same middle school.
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layla5alive 19 days ago
Probably not, but then again, it's a small world! What state? Northeast?
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dcow 10 days ago
Midwest.
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bowersbros 32 days ago
I had a teacher who told us to make a website using Powerpoint..

Turns out you save save as HTML and any links you put between slides become anchor tags.

Pretty neat, but hurt my soul to have all my classmates do that

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moduspol 32 days ago
Hmm. Dreamweaver must be what the cool kids were using instead of Frontpage.
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noumenon1111 32 days ago
I was a cool kid! I used FrontPage :D
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hbogert 31 days ago
Yeah that's what they all thought :P
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arsenicwater 33 days ago
Were they paying for the Dreamweaver licenses?
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anon7000 32 days ago
When I had web design a bit after 2010, they still used Dreamweaver and yeah you could get a license for free via the university. That’s pretty normal (eg giving you a Visual Studio license, Office, all that). It was more crazy that the course was so incredibly basic (nothing more than static page building in dreamweaver) at this college compared to the other one I later transferred to
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nekusar 33 days ago
Please. Universities have students by the short and curlies. They can academically do basically whatever they want, and fail you for not complying. Professors can even demand their book be purchased, and fail for not buying the book.

Most universities are unethical shitholes that can do basically whatever they want to gatekeep a diploma.

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dcow 33 days ago
It’s getting so bad. My wife is in a remote school where they fail students occasionally to squeeze a little extra $$ out of them.
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what 33 days ago
I’m sorry your wife failed some classes, but it’s probably not because the school wants some extra money.
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picofarad 32 days ago
They didn't say that.
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mort96 32 days ago
They did seem to think that it's a problem for schools to fail students.
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high_na_euv 32 days ago
How are you so sure?

There is so much shady things about academic env that it doesnt sound scary

Ive witnessed situation where "hard" prof was teaching and many ppl failed, and then thry received "easy" prof and they passed

But they had to pay for exams and retake, etc

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