[Obi Wan's Ghost]

BTW, your site looks like **** and I just love the 'Flash detection'

Isn't that by Macromedia? Did you pay for Flash on its own or save money by buying it as part of a suite? Or did you pirate it and need to be reported for that?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Why not stop being selective and manipulative in your "I'm so superior" arguments and cut to the point you really want to make: "Allahu Akbar! I want my software for free because I'm so useless at this web design thing I'll never make a profit.......and I have paying for software or keeping the employees of big software companies in their jobs"

Nice job, keep it up loser

What's with the attacks? Are you trying to get into some sort of thing where we compare credentials and experience?

How about this, if you really insist on the attacks, how about backing up your attacks with some actual substance? Saying that Dreamweaver has some option in a menu doesn't really display an understanding of the underlying concepts, does it? You are welcome to elaborate on how you actually use Dreamweaver to handle managing dynamic content in the form of a free exchange of ideas. Otherwise, I'm done with this pseudo-argument you've instigated.

BTW, I'm an owner of BBEdit.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

BTW, your site looks like **** and I just love the 'Flash detection'

Isn't that by Macromedia? Did you pay for Flash on its own or save money by buying it as part of a suite? Or did you pirate it and need to be reported for that?

WTF dude? When did I attack Flash? See if you can figure out why I need Flash on the site, and what teh Flash detection is for.

I'll ignore your personal insult too, it is obvious you are just trying to save face.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Man, I really haven't meant to offend you but your attitude towards the most well respected and productive tools combined with that **** site design you have on Net Musician doesn't gel. You fix that site and I'll respect your opinion.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Man, I really haven't meant to offend you but your attitude towards the most well respected and productive tools combined with that **** site design you have on Net Musician doesn't gel. You fix that site and I'll respect your opinion.

Substance. Please start offering it, or I'll simply ignore you.

Thanks!

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by besson3c

Substance. Please start offering it, or I'll simply ignore you.

Thanks!

For a start did you ever think about what your site looks like when people have cookies turned off or are using Safari in private browsing mode? Take a look at this royal ugliness



Nice site testing.

[besson3c]

P.S. would you like your sites critiqued? I'd be happy to do so in a constructive manner.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

For a start did you ever think about what your site looks like when people have cookies turned off or are using Safari in private browsing mode? Take a look at this royal ugliness



Nice site testing.

Cookies are required, as they are on many sites. I set the playlist for the mediaplayer based on cookies. I suppose I should include some error checking for those that have disabled cookies.

Haven't tested Safari in Private Browsing Mode. That's not something that I normally add to my checklist of things to test.

Any sites of yours you would care to have critiqued? I'd love to see the kind of spew that Dreamweaver has put together. BTW, did you know that Google doesn't give as high PageRanks to pages not coded with semantic web concepts in mind?

[besson3c]

I'm glad something productive came of this conversation. Now I know that some weird things happen when cookies are disabled in Safari. Good to know.

[besson3c]

BTW, how will a $400 product help test how pages work when you have cookies disabled in your browser? Or, are we just getting into personal attacks here?

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by besson3c

P.S. would you like your sites critiqued? I'd be happy to do so in a constructive manner.

Um no because I'm not here to advertise my real identity or company. I have worked on or given advice on over ten sites. This is ten of their Pageranks (since you brought it up) 6,6,7,7,7,8,6,5,7,5.

They all have an Alexa rank of within the top 100,000 and one of them is ranked within 800. The first five in that list I have linked to them in the forums. They achieved their Pageranks within two months.

Netmusician has been around longer than all of them, has terrible design, crap graphic elements, really bad color matching, bugs for visitors with cookies turned off which immediately makes it an inaccessible site for many, and this the site's score after ages online: Pagerank 5, Alexa rating 1,620,015.

That is lame. I could come up with a concept for musicians and put a site up for them in two months and get it a Pagerank 6 and Alexa 50,000 in no time. You bet I would use Dreamweaver as part of the formula!

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Um no because I'm not here to advertise my real identity or company. I have worked on or given advice on over ten sites. This is ten of their Pageranks (since you brought it up) 6,6,7,7,7,8,6,5,7,5.

They all have an Alexa rank of within the top 100,000 and one of them is ranked within 800. The first five in that list I have linked to them in the forums. They achieved their Pageranks within two months.

Netmusician has been around longer than all of them, has terrible design, crap graphic elements, really bad color matching, bugs for visitors with cookies turned off which immediately makes it an inaccessible site for many, and this the site's score after ages online: Pagerank 5, Alexa rating 1,620,015.

That is lame. I could come up with a concept for musicians and put a site up for them in two months and get it a Pagerank 6 and Alexa 50,000 in no time. You bet I would use Dreamweaver as part of the formula!

How is PageRank determined? In part due to page popularity, another due to uniqueness of content, another based on the level of quality in the coding. My site has a small user base because it is essentially still in development (the big part of it centering around the Webkit software), and I don't offer a whole lot of useful content right now. I've done very little to grow the user base, because the Webkit is still a work in progress. I've also developed several commercial and academic non-musician websites, but since I know what your intentions are, I won't share them with you for your critique.

You can criticize the graphic design all you want, I'm not a graphic designer really. I'm more of a web programmer and sys admin. At some point, I'd like to hire somebody to mockup designs in Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever so that I can focus on the part of what I do that I enjoy the most. However, as far as I'm concerned, you can develop the prettiest sites in the world but I wouldn't hire you to develop a large site if you have no knowledge of developing dynamic content. Maintaining a site costs time and money, I'd feel guilty about handing over a large site to somebody if it wasn't in a state where it can be easily maintained (and, a bunch of static pages controlled by Dreamweaver does not make for good page maintenance at all).

I've studied usability, I've studied accessibility (which is one of the reasons why I was forced to detect hi vs. low bandwidth, which is one of the reasons for the Flash detection - the Flash detection is not simply detecting whether or not Flash is installed). The NetMusician site is actually pretty technically ambitious. Watch what happens when you navigate between pages while something is playing in the media player. I had to use iframes (which I normally hate) to do this, and I had to do bandwidth detection so that I wouldn't force the pre-loading of a large sound clip off on modem users.

How many pages have you created with Dreamweaver that didn't require manual correction to clean up the code? How much of your time was needed to clean up these turds? This is the point. If you care to continue with this conversation, you will have to cut out the personal attacks. They are inappropriate, especially since you have conveniently diverged from the original points I was making in order to try to one-up me.

It is clear that you are not a web programmer. I wouldn't hire you to put together a large site, you wouldn't hire me to put together the front end to a site that required a lot of fancy graphic design. Cool. Now, perhaps you have a little perspective as to why somebody who does what I do would feel strongly against tools like Dreamweaver.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by besson3c

How is PageRank determined?

You were boasting about semantics and Pagerank so I had to hand your ass to you covered in chocolates and candles.

It is clear that you are not a web programmer. I wouldn't hire you to put together a large site, you wouldn't hire me to put together the front end to a site that required a lot of fancy graphic design. Cool. Now, perhaps you have a little perspective as to why somebody who does what I do would feel strongly against tools like Dreamweaver.

None of the sites I have worked on or helped on are graphic intensive or rely on fancy graphics. I'm a CSS man. I always suggest to friends and site owners to tone graphics down. But whatever graphics exist have to look like they weren't created by a Taleban cave dweller who uses his mouse the wrong way around. Net Musician's graphic elements are crap and the site design in general apart from the graphics are stuck in the mid 90s when Netscape and gray backgrounds were common.

All but one of the sites I helped on are database driven.

[besson3c]

Helped on... So you admit that you personally know nothing about dynamic content. So you were arguing why?

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by besson3c

Helped on... So you admit that you personally know nothing about dynamic content. So you were arguing why?

You're twisting my words, your site is crap, nobody else is reading anymore and I'm laughing at you

BTW, currently I am in Mauritius building a dynamic database driven site for a major multinational whose sites are visited by millions every week. I got flown from NY to this place and have my accomodation paid for. If you weren't so vain you could be improving your site right now with advice from myself and others with whatever tools you want instead of dissing one and being such a turd.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

You're twisting my words, your site is crap, nobody else is reading anymore and I'm laughing at you

BTW, currently I am in Mauritius building a dynamic database driven site for a major multinational whose sites are visited by millions every week. I got flown from NY to this place and have my accomodation paid for. If you weren't so vain you could be improving your site right now with advice from myself and others with whatever tools you want instead of dissing one and being such a turd.

I knew this conversation would degenerate to you hauling your dick out to show us how big it is. I asked you some very specific questions about what you understand about dynamic content, since this was at the heart of the argument about Dreamweaver that you started replying to. You have not responded with anything of substance except personal attacks about the merits of my graphic design ability, which were not at all the focus of my argument.

I'm done with you. You have provided little of substance to discuss, and have contributed nothing except remarks intended to be hurtful in nature.

You are officially an asshole. Nice work!

[besson3c]

In a weird sort of way, I'm glad this stupid conversation occurred, because it gave me an opportunity to fix the problems that occur when cookies are disabled.

Thanks?

[loren s]

Umm,, I'm back but I really don't have squat to say now.

[pyrite]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

You're twisting my words, your site is crap, nobody else is reading anymore and I'm laughing at you

BTW, currently I am in Mauritius building a dynamic database driven site for a major multinational whose sites are visited by millions every week. I got flown from NY to this place and have my accomodation paid for. If you weren't so vain you could be improving your site right now with advice from myself and others with whatever tools you want instead of dissing one and being such a turd.

get a life. slamming other people's creative works is not cool, keep it to yourself. and please take your bickering elsewhere. people come to forums for information, not immature crap like this. you like a more graphic interface, he likes hand-coding.. deal with it

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by pyrite

you like a more graphic interface, he likes hand-coding.. deal with it

That proves you didn't read jack. He was giving out misinformation and coming across as oh so superior recommending people to use several apps to do one job when it comes out cheaper and easier to use one app. By his account he spent money on BBEdit, Flash Professional and uses other apps always switching between the lot of them when it is more cost efficient to purchase Macromedia Studio which not only comes with Dreamweaver and Flash but other applications too.

His site did need to be called crap if he was going to put himself on a pedestal and it helps him at the end of the day to improve it. I have seen his site many times and he does give lots of good advice most of the time and helps people with their coding. This time his opinion on Dreamweaver was not very thoughtful and it was provocative. Hence I was provoked and called him out. It doesn't hurt either of us and we don't need anyone to interfere in OUR public argument to teach either of us morals. Arguments are a natural process of debate and discovery.

[pyrite]

i dont know jack about web development, i wasnt commenting on who was right or wrong. just the bizarre nature of your argument. 'Arguments are a natural process of debate and discovery'.. please.. maybe they are when the involved parties don't have to stoop to personal low blows to make their point. but calling someone's web site 'crap' is not constructive criticism. it's not my argument i know, but still... you've made this one retarded thread!

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by pyrite

don't have to stoop to personal low blows to make their point. but calling someone's web site 'crap' is not constructive criticism. it's not my argument i know, but still... you've made this one retarded thread!

No it was made retarded by a claim that Dreamweaver is a $400 text editor.

And a personal low blow is nothing like saying a site's design is crap. That is a hard criticism that a product can be a lot better, not the maker of the product! When I see a McDonald's burger and call it a load of useless sh!t am I attacking the product or the guy who started the company? Reason says attacks on McDonald's hamburgers are calls for improvement of standards.

I am sorry for being blunt but the way he went about trying to ridicule Dreamweaver and my own knowledge makes it an equal argument both ways. I prefer bluntness because an argument is over and done with quickly instead of lasting five pages of unsubstantiated claims and misinformation. Notice I had nothing negative or wrong to say about the applications others use instead of Dreamweaver.......because at least I have used them all.

If someone is going to say something conclusive about an application it would help if they used them first.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

That proves you didn't read jack. He was giving out misinformation and coming across as oh so superior recommending people to use several apps to do one job when it comes out cheaper and easier to use one app. By his account he spent money on BBEdit, Flash Professional and uses other apps always switching between the lot of them when it is more cost efficient to purchase Macromedia Studio which not only comes with Dreamweaver and Flash but other applications too.

His site did need to be called crap if he was going to put himself on a pedestal and it helps him at the end of the day to improve it. I have seen his site many times and he does give lots of good advice most of the time and helps people with their coding. This time his opinion on Dreamweaver was not very thoughtful and it was provocative. Hence I was provoked and called him out. It doesn't hurt either of us and we don't need anyone to interfere in OUR public argument to teach either of us morals. Arguments are a natural process of debate and discovery.

WTF is wrong with you? Does thinking poorly Dreamweaver hurt your feelings? You had absolutely *no* justification to insult my work, none whatsoever. Provocative? It's just a f-ing tool...

Misinformation? You like pointy and clicky tools because your strengths probably lie more with graphic design, as you refused to respond to any of my questions about issues relating to the back-end, where Dreamweaver is not particularly well suited, in my tentative opinion. If you want to debate this, step up to the plate and debate this. Getting into the quality of my graphic design had *nothing* to do with this, you were just trying to bring me down because you are an asshole, plain and simple.

Do you take meds or something normally?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

No it was made retarded by a claim that Dreamweaver is a $400 text editor.

And a personal low blow is nothing like saying a site's design is crap. That is a hard criticism that a product can be a lot better, not the maker of the product! When I see a McDonald's burger and call it a load of useless sh!t am I attacking the product or the guy who started the company? Reason says attacks on McDonald's hamburgers are calls for improvement of standards.

a) I didn't ask for your opinion of my site

b) You have not offered this thread any real substance, which I would expect as a minimum pre-requisite before completely crapping all over me. Step up to the plate, or go away.

c) If you want to go on about me being on a pedestal, perhaps you should ask questions and find out exactly why I do things such as use that Flash detection page before redirecting them to the site? The reason for doing that actually has very little to do with Flash detection. Why claim to have the solution to the problem if you don't know what the problem is?

I am sorry for being blunt but the way he went about trying to ridicule Dreamweaver and my own knowledge makes it an equal argument both ways. I prefer bluntness because an argument is over and done with quickly instead of lasting five pages of unsubstantiated claims and misinformation. Notice I had nothing negative or wrong to say about the applications others use instead of Dreamweaver.......because at least I have used them all.

If someone is going to say something conclusive about an application it would help if they used them first.

Shouldn't I be the one you are apologizing to? How old are you?

Why don't you actually make an argument? How is Dreamweaver a useful tool for maintaining a site that is based on database driven content, like many sites are these days? If you use it to generate website templates then fine, but wouldn't that site manager component be pretty much worthless in this case?

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

I didn't ask for your opinion of my site

But you did go making assumptions about the quality of my work so I gave my opinion of yours. This is the insult you gave long before I called your site's design crap:

"It's a shame that you have no clue as to how little you actually know.....Sorry dude, you don't know what you're talking about."

You expect to have you ass licked or kicked after that?

How is Dreamweaver a useful tool for maintaining a site that is based on database driven content, like many sites are these days? If you use it to generate website templates then fine, but wouldn't that site manager component be pretty much worthless in this case?

Since it was neither of us who first said Dreamweaver could create database schemas this was originally off topic.

The topic was about a design application and you called Dreamweaver a $400 text editor which caused several people to rebutt you and I was the most aggressive of them because I probably use it more than anyone who has turned up. You made several guesses about the application based on something you read somewhere and you conclusions were all wrong. Your alternative was worse:

1. Spend $200 on BBEdit. An inferior product to Dreamweaver in terms of website coding and doesn't integrate as well with......
2. Spend $699 on Flash Professional, that one presumes you paid for if you did pay for it.
3. Spend money on other shareware apps or/and get other free ones.
4. Multitask between all of them to get the same amount of features you would get in Dreamweaver.

Conclusion: You advocate spend as much money as Macromedia Studio costs and spending a lot more time acquiring and and switching between those apps.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

But you did go making assumptions about the quality of my work so I gave my opinion of yours.

Bullshit. I did nothing of the sort. Stop trying to justify your behavior.

The topic was about a design application and you called Dreamweaver a $400 text editor which caused several people to rebutt you and I was the most aggressive of them because I probably use it more than anyone who has turned up. You made several guesses about the application based on something you read somewhere and you conclusions were all wrong. Your alternative was worse:

If you are not using it for WYSIWYG layout, it is a text editor in the most literal sense, just like XCode is a text editor. What's the problem here?

1. Spend $200 on BBEdit. An inferior product to Dreamweaver in terms of website coding and doesn't integrate as well with......
2. Spend $699 on Flash Professional, that one presumes you paid for if you did pay for it.

We never brought the idea of Flash development to the table. I usually do very little of it. If you want to spend the extra bucks to provide the embed tags for Flash movies, go ahead. I don't quite see the compelling argument here, but to each their own.

3. Spend money on other shareware apps or/and get other free ones.

I use each tool I have at my disposal for what it can do. If I did use Dreamweaver, it would just be another one of those tools, as it is essentially designed to create static pages or templates for dynamic pages. I don't do very much of this these days, and I don't get the sense that the industry is interested in returning back to static content.

Conclusion: You advocate spend as much money as Macromedia Studio costs and spending a lot more time acquiring and and switching between those apps.

I advocate not using any Macromedia/Adobe app for site design (outside of Photoshop/Illustrator), unless you want to do something that requires Flash. To each their own, but particularly if you are designing dynamic content I don't think this is money well spent. If you are designing static content, use whatever, I don't care... I think this is probably the exception these days.

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I advocate not using any Macromedia/Adobe app, unless you want to do something that requires Flash.

Well there we are then. 99% of the design industry would collapse into the stone age with your advice

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Well there we are then.

I did revise what I wrote above to qualify Photoshop/Illustrator/the like, if that is the basis for your eye rolling.


Do you create a lot of Flash-driven sites?

[Obi Wan's Ghost]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I did revise what I wrote above to qualify Photoshop/Illustrator/the like, if that is the basis for your eye rolling.

Oh ok so less suites and more expensive individual apps to switch between and less integration too.

Do you create a lot of Flash-driven sites?

Only if it's the only option.

[angelkrush]

There seems to be 2 kind sof folks haveing a discussion- do-it-yourself-computer science techies and ordinary web designers/developers.

I for one am a designer, and no one can tell designers that they are better off doing web work by hand. Designers dont care about PHP, SQL, blah blah blah. It;s abotu just buildign somethign as simply as possible and on to the next priject. save the fancy stuff for the programmers.

Admittedly, I leearned coding by hand before i came across th wysisyg apps. golive did wonders for me back in the days before adobe purchased it. And life was good. Dreamweavers code is super clean compared to what it used to be, and its inclusion of css in d8 is actually helping me learn it without going crazy.

If you dont want to pay for software that is your business. I have never paid for major apps, ask me how Free software usually has a lack of elegance that a subsidized development application will include. Designers and web designers positions became blurred in the las couple of years since ther great web fallout and it has been a disaster ever since- my departments always used to have thier own web developers- now it is the role of the designer to learn html, javascript, all that crap that they should not be doing.

So for designers like us, BBEdit suks, dreamweaver rules, and there is a place for both. if i want to write a page up in code for old times sakes im heading for bbedit. at production time, its dreamweaver all the way.

ps- adobe says they will position the next golive to address the needs of designers to better layout pages and such. I say bring it on- there are many levels of designers, and we certainly dont need another dreamweaver. OR BBEDIT.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Obi Wan's Ghost

Oh ok so less suites and more expensive individual apps to switch between and less integration too.

More expensive individual apps? Where are you getting this from? I work with AFP/Netatalk, emacs, and BBEdit right now, although I could use any text editor for a good quantity of my work if I had to. I also use an assortment of other small tools. I split my life between being Unix sys-admin and doing web stuff, Unix people are generally not into expensive tools.

I go for whatever buys me the most, providing the cost is reasonable. If I desired the intergration that Dreamweaver offered, I'd be there. I don't really understand what sort of integration Dreamweaver offers that I would benefit from... An integrated upload mechanism? Don't need that.... Integration with Flash? Don't need that...

As far as other people go, dynamic content comes back to straight-up middleware language coding and database interaction. I remain unconvinced that Dreamweaver offers $400 worth of compelling features for web programmers.

The thing is, I see the direction the industry is going in splitting between graphic designers and web programmers (and perhaps some usability study in there somewhere). If I were running a company that cranked out websites for companies and other clientel that required an extensive design effort, I wouldn't hire graphic designers to do the coding, because frankly that generally isn't their forte.

I think Dreamweaver may have been designed back when graphic designers were web page authors, and there wasn't really a great need for web programmers for basic content delivery. I simply cannot fathom a large company doing well using a tool like Dreamweaver to maintain their large site, it just doens't make any sense, and Contribute is a joke.

Dreamweaver might be useful for generating templates for dynamic sites, for mocking stuff up, but in doing so you'd only be using a subset of the features offered by Dreamweaver. At what point should one question the point of using Dreamweaver in this context to begin with?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by angelkrush

There seems to be 2 kind sof folks haveing a discussion- do-it-yourself-computer science techies and ordinary web designers/developers.

I for one am a designer, and no one can tell designers that they are better off doing web work by hand. Designers dont care about PHP, SQL, blah blah blah. It;s abotu just buildign somethign as simply as possible and on to the next priject. save the fancy stuff for the programmers.

Admittedly, I leearned coding by hand before i came across th wysisyg apps. golive did wonders for me back in the days before adobe purchased it. And life was good. Dreamweavers code is super clean compared to what it used to be, and its inclusion of css in d8 is actually helping me learn it without going crazy.

If you dont want to pay for software that is your business. I have never paid for major apps, ask me how Free software usually has a lack of elegance that a subsidized development application will include. Designers and web designers positions became blurred in the las couple of years since ther great web fallout and it has been a disaster ever since- my departments always used to have thier own web developers- now it is the role of the designer to learn html, javascript, all that crap that they should not be doing.

So for designers like us, BBEdit suks, dreamweaver rules, and there is a place for both. if i want to write a page up in code for old times sakes im heading for bbedit. at production time, its dreamweaver all the way.

ps- adobe says they will position the next golive to address the needs of designers to better layout pages and such. I say bring it on- there are many levels of designers, and we certainly dont need another dreamweaver. OR BBEDIT.

So you're a designer, okay... In your experience, how do you work in teams to develop for large sites? Do you have a separate programmer and designer? How do you turn over the reins to the programmer/developers of the back-end of the site? Do you give them mockups in Photoshop/Illustrator for them to code, or do you give them completed HTML/XHTML templates for them to use? Are you responsible for the actual content of the site, or do you set things up so that your client can make their own edits to their site via a CMS of some sort?

I'm not trying to put you on the defensive at all, nor am I questioning the quality of your work... just wondering in a very genuine way what your workflow is like.

[redesigner]

Originally Posted by registered_user

You're suggesting that Microsoft will all of the sudden produce a web page builder that doesn't suck based on its glorious history of making creative apps that do suck so I hardly think you're any type of judge of what reasoning is realistic.

Wasnt this created by someone else, and then Microsoft acquired it... if so, then the whole point about the quality of Microsoft's software is moot here... though they can screw it up yet

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by redesigner

Wasnt this created by someone else, and then Microsoft acquired it... if so, then the whole point about the quality of Microsoft's software is moot here... though they can screw it up yet

Yes, though it looks like they have put their own spin on it in the intervening time.

[parallax]

Okay, knock it off.

*locked*