IHNJ
When I was working for Prometric (Thomson Learning) in 2000, designing their intranet, for whatever reason, we were told that we had to standardize on Web Development Software. I don't mean what language we 1 would be programming in; we'd already had the fight over ASP vs. PHP vs. ColdFusion 2. Rather, this was the program in which we would be writing the code.
Now, to me, this was a silly debate, because my automatic answer was "Notepad". Notepad was easy to use, it had nothing to distract the user from what he was doing, it didn't try to do anything for you, and - best of all - it came with the operating system (we were all using Windows 98 at the time), so it was completely free to the company. Every computer had Notepad on it.
The company, and specifically my manager, didn't see it that way. To them, you weren't really programming - you couldn't - unless you had a programming tool, like Dreamweaver or FrontPage or NetObjects Fusion. And so we were made to decide what programming tool we would be using.
There was great debate over this. Some of the folks wanted Dreamweaver because it was easy to use; some wanted FrontPage because it interfaced well with the IIS server; some wanted NetObjects Fusion because it was what they'd used on previous projects and they were used to it. (I sided with the Dreamweaver camp, if I was forced to side at all; the reason being that I could get Dreamweaver to a state where it was basically Notepad with line numbers. 3)
Along the way, while we were testing the various platforms to see which we preferred, I noticed something odd: Frontpage was adding code to my markup and ASP. That seemed pretty strange to me, but I asked around, and it turned out that yes, that really was the case. So as a benchmark, I wrote a sample page of HTML and ASP 4 that took up exactly one printed page, and then opened and saved it using each of the programs we were considering using.
Then I printed out each of the raw-code/markup documents, stapled each document together top-to-bottom if it was more than one page, and hung them on the bulletin board outside our shared cubicle. The end result:
Notepad: 1 page.
Dreamweaver: 1 page 5.
Frontpage: 9 pages.
NetObjects Fusion: 43 pages.
No, that isn't a typo. NOF literally added 42 pages of unnecessary cruft to a 1-page document.
We went with Dreamweaver.
1: Really just me; our team consisted of two content guys, a user interface guy, a design guy, and a back-end guy, and I was the back-end guy. Nobody else actually had to deal with programming the site; even the UI and design guys did all their work in Illustrator, Photoshop, and Powerpoint, and then left me with the CSS implementation.
2: None of us wanted to deal with Perl, ColdFusion - at the time - not only required its own server software but practically required its own client, and PHP required installing extra extensions on the IIS server, so we went with ASP. It was the least work and outlay on the server guy's part, but the most on mine, since I already knew PHP and was only familiar with ASP.)
3: NetObjects Fusion, on the other hand, I opposed to the point of telling its proponent (my manager, of course) that I would not be working on the project if it was used. The reason for this was that NOF, at the time, didn't actually let you work with the HTML without opening NOF itself: the program bundled all of the code into an "application", and only released it when you "published" your website. In the meantime, you had to open NOF to make a one-character change (such as replacing a < with a >, if you'd made a typo), which to me seemed like an absurd amount of overhead.
4: In Notepad, naturally.
5: Dreamweaver did make two small adjustments, but they changed neither the actual meaning of the code itself nor the length of the document, and to be honest I don't remember at this point what they were.
Now, to me, this was a silly debate, because my automatic answer was "Notepad". Notepad was easy to use, it had nothing to distract the user from what he was doing, it didn't try to do anything for you, and - best of all - it came with the operating system (we were all using Windows 98 at the time), so it was completely free to the company. Every computer had Notepad on it.
The company, and specifically my manager, didn't see it that way. To them, you weren't really programming - you couldn't - unless you had a programming tool, like Dreamweaver or FrontPage or NetObjects Fusion. And so we were made to decide what programming tool we would be using.
There was great debate over this. Some of the folks wanted Dreamweaver because it was easy to use; some wanted FrontPage because it interfaced well with the IIS server; some wanted NetObjects Fusion because it was what they'd used on previous projects and they were used to it. (I sided with the Dreamweaver camp, if I was forced to side at all; the reason being that I could get Dreamweaver to a state where it was basically Notepad with line numbers. 3)
Along the way, while we were testing the various platforms to see which we preferred, I noticed something odd: Frontpage was adding code to my markup and ASP. That seemed pretty strange to me, but I asked around, and it turned out that yes, that really was the case. So as a benchmark, I wrote a sample page of HTML and ASP 4 that took up exactly one printed page, and then opened and saved it using each of the programs we were considering using.
Then I printed out each of the raw-code/markup documents, stapled each document together top-to-bottom if it was more than one page, and hung them on the bulletin board outside our shared cubicle. The end result:
Notepad: 1 page.
Dreamweaver: 1 page 5.
Frontpage: 9 pages.
NetObjects Fusion: 43 pages.
No, that isn't a typo. NOF literally added 42 pages of unnecessary cruft to a 1-page document.
We went with Dreamweaver.
1: Really just me; our team consisted of two content guys, a user interface guy, a design guy, and a back-end guy, and I was the back-end guy. Nobody else actually had to deal with programming the site; even the UI and design guys did all their work in Illustrator, Photoshop, and Powerpoint, and then left me with the CSS implementation.
2: None of us wanted to deal with Perl, ColdFusion - at the time - not only required its own server software but practically required its own client, and PHP required installing extra extensions on the IIS server, so we went with ASP. It was the least work and outlay on the server guy's part, but the most on mine, since I already knew PHP and was only familiar with ASP.)
3: NetObjects Fusion, on the other hand, I opposed to the point of telling its proponent (my manager, of course) that I would not be working on the project if it was used. The reason for this was that NOF, at the time, didn't actually let you work with the HTML without opening NOF itself: the program bundled all of the code into an "application", and only released it when you "published" your website. In the meantime, you had to open NOF to make a one-character change (such as replacing a < with a >, if you'd made a typo), which to me seemed like an absurd amount of overhead.
4: In Notepad, naturally.
5: Dreamweaver did make two small adjustments, but they changed neither the actual meaning of the code itself nor the length of the document, and to be honest I don't remember at this point what they were.