I'll generally lean towards any kind of ubiquitous freeware app, or a web app, to avoid such hangups since I work on no less than a dozen computers. Most of the bigger suites' added "value" are often what turn me off. With some of the big web editing apps, proprietary features seems to piss all over W3C/IETF standards, entice boneheads to pile on the crap, and it's murder on backwards/forwards/cross-compatibility.
I pick on Dreamweaver a lot, because of mondo cross-compatibility problems back in the day. I remember working on several group projects, in DreamWeaver 3.0 UltraDev, but we couldn't ever get a template from one system to work properly on another system. Same hardware, same OS, same version of DreamWeaver... All I could think of was that some plugin, unique to one system, was the culprit. We never could figure it out, and wound up having all of us to resort to remote accessing the same system to work. When I was putting together my portfolio, after graduating, NOTHING I had worked right in 4.0 - even the crap-free stuff I had done myself. I'm glad that I didn't pay full price for it.
Y'know, now that I think about it... I've never liked Macromedia authoring products. Or, rather, they never liked me. Freehand, Splash/Flash, Director, and Dreamweaver have never really lived up to expectations, every time I've tried 'em. I always felt like I was fighting the app, more than I was creating anything, and it was slowing me down. I never tried any of 'em again, after 2000, and usually pimp out KompoZer to any clients who might want to do minor edits, or try making their own sites. So far, the strict HTML 4.01 output has been easy for me to go in and manually edit the code, and I haven't heard of any cross-compatibility problems like I had with DreamWeaver.
I'm usually a shill for Adobe programs, but I'm still gun-shy about their implementation of Dreamweaver, and I've never tried GoLive before.
I never had multiple computer issues like that, but I do know that in 1999, browsers displayed html differently, even if the page was written entirely in notepad. We used the first Dreamweaver and Illustrator 6 to do our web design, and learned to work with the differences in how browsers displayed the html. The more you learn to keep the stuff simple, the more likely you were to have it display the same in every browser. But I was majoring in design, not software engineering, so 90% of our time doing websites was drawing page layouts one page at a time in Illustrator and printing them out, with website design having more of an emphasis on "will this website be viewable to colorblind users? Does the color pallette work well with the navagation?" than "is this scrolling text java app awesome? How much Flash can I put in before it crashes? How much bandwidth is being used per page? (I had a roommate who was an SE in 2005 who got paid to streamline bandwidth usage in existing websites)"
I think the problem with any web authoring product is that they all have their own learning curve and multiple steps for doing the same thing. While creating something in notepad is just a matter of typing the lines you know you want, it might take 5 steps in Dreamweaver, and 8 in Go Live and look totally different because you're not 100% proficient with one or the other. I don't know how Go Live is today, but 10 years ago it was worse than dreamweaver. You could make a page in Go Live, open it in Dreamweaver, and have it "clean up" or remove 10-15% of the code Go Live used and it would look exactly the same.
But really, web design is like any other programming, or cars, or women: It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to work.
Between Trident, Webkit, Gecko, Presto, and everything else I'm frankly amazed the web works at all. Yeah, that's why it's good to maintain a balance of effectiveness and features, but it's so hard to convey the importance of such balance to customers who want their site to be the next America Online.
I pick on Dreamweaver a lot, because of mondo cross-compatibility problems back in the day. I remember working on several group projects, in DreamWeaver 3.0 UltraDev, but we couldn't ever get a template from one system to work properly on another system. Same hardware, same OS, same version of DreamWeaver... All I could think of was that some plugin, unique to one system, was the culprit. We never could figure it out, and wound up having all of us to resort to remote accessing the same system to work. When I was putting together my portfolio, after graduating, NOTHING I had worked right in 4.0 - even the crap-free stuff I had done myself. I'm glad that I didn't pay full price for it.
Y'know, now that I think about it... I've never liked Macromedia authoring products. Or, rather, they never liked me. Freehand, Splash/Flash, Director, and Dreamweaver have never really lived up to expectations, every time I've tried 'em. I always felt like I was fighting the app, more than I was creating anything, and it was slowing me down. I never tried any of 'em again, after 2000, and usually pimp out KompoZer to any clients who might want to do minor edits, or try making their own sites. So far, the strict HTML 4.01 output has been easy for me to go in and manually edit the code, and I haven't heard of any cross-compatibility problems like I had with DreamWeaver.
I'm usually a shill for Adobe programs, but I'm still gun-shy about their implementation of Dreamweaver, and I've never tried GoLive before.
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I think the problem with any web authoring product is that they all have their own learning curve and multiple steps for doing the same thing. While creating something in notepad is just a matter of typing the lines you know you want, it might take 5 steps in Dreamweaver, and 8 in Go Live and look totally different because you're not 100% proficient with one or the other. I don't know how Go Live is today, but 10 years ago it was worse than dreamweaver. You could make a page in Go Live, open it in Dreamweaver, and have it "clean up" or remove 10-15% of the code Go Live used and it would look exactly the same.
But really, web design is like any other programming, or cars, or women: It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to work.
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