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Comment by shereadsthenews | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how they can claim with seriousness to have written the first editor for web development.

As another commenter noted, the claim is more that Coda was the first "one app for all": a built-in text editor, FTP client, real-time previewer, site manager, and terminal.

Even so, as much as I like Panic, I don't know if I'd quite support that claim. Dreamweaver did a lot of those things sans the terminal, even if it did a lot of them less elegantly. (And I'm sure someone will explain how Emacs could technically have done all this since 1953 or whatever. I kid, I kid!)

Having said that, I'm still interested in seeing what they manage to come up with. I admire their products even when I don't regularly use them. (This includes Coda.)

Allaire Homesite did pretty much all of that in 1996—code editing, browser previews, site management, FTP client.

I confess my memories of Homesite are pretty dim at this point, even though I used it professionally for a few years. I recall it as being notably worse at the non-editing parts of that than Coda is, but still, credit where it's due.

(Semi-funny anecdote: when I switched to the Mac around 1999 or so, I emailed Allaire--this was before Macromedia bought them--and asked if there would ever be a Mac version. They wrote back nicely enough to explain that they really couldn't do one because it was written in Delphi, which had no Mac version, but that I should consider looking into BBEdit. I still use BBEdit regularly to this day.)

I still use HomeSite+ in a Windows XP virtual machine as a CFML editor. I know it's an embarrassingly outdated piece of software, but I'm familiar with it and every attempt to migrate to something newer failed. I do use BBEdit for CSS and XCode for ObjC, it's just that HS+ styles and autocompletes CFML in a familiar way.)

If you think it's crazy to run a whole VM to edit text files, consider that as it uses half a gig of memory, can load from cold to an editable window in a few seconds, and the UI is hilariously snappy, running an XP VM is competitive with running Eclipse. And that is saying something.

Much like George R.R. Martin who still uses WordStar for DOS, it's just the consequence of what we're comfortable with—and who cares what tools you use as long as the output isn't compromised.

CF Studio (Homesite's big brother) was my first thought. I used it for 10+ years before switching to OSX and even that Mac switch was many years ago. I'd guess CF Studio has been around for ~20 years and had FTP, site management, datasource interaction, etc.

PageMill is a contender too, from 1995. Dreamweaver in 1997. I remember using both of those in one of my first jobs.

PageMill doesn't have a real site manager, it only has a sidebar that shows the files of a folder, but doesn't know anything about the site's structure. It is really just a notch above Netscape Composer.

I looked at Coda and thought it was targeting a very specific one person shop type developer. Like the type of person who wanted SASS and minifiers and all that good stuff, but didn't want to deal with NPM and gulp/grunt/webpack/etc, and just a button to push to go live.

The issue is the competition is a bunch of free Github project templates, and that git workflows are standardized now. (Plus I've been using Macs since the cro magnon era and VS Code works great for me despite not being "native"). So I'm interested what they come up with but I'm suspecting it will target a very specific workflow & type of customer.

Quite likely. Coda is great at what it does, but it doesn't integrate with version control systems, which is a fatal flaw at this point. I suspect that's going to be addressed in the next version, but I'm curious how "general" they're planning to make it. Another commenter theorized Panic might be setting it up to be more of a Webstorm competitor than a VS Code competitor.

Heck, I remember Microsoft FrontPage doing at least some of this.

Y'all have forgetten about HotDog HTML (best downloaded from Tucows and paired with Webmonkey as a reference guide).

It's classic Apple-cultism, everything is done there first, even if it wasn't. Lets just say it's not surprising they're making their new editor Mac only.

I thought this too. What about dreamweaver?

Did Dreamweaver support all stages of web development, including uploading to your server? I think that's what Panic is talking about here, how Coda was your one-stop shop for everything, including deploying your site.

When I last used it (early 2000s) it had built-in FTP support

Dreamweaver definitely had upload-on-save (not sure if that functionality predated Coda, but it was there the last time I used it in 2008 or so)

Whoa! Look at that goalpost go!

What are you talking about? The page was very explicit about what it meant:

> It put the tools you needed to make a web page together in one app, and nobody had ever done that before.

All I did was ask if Dreamweaver supported one particular aspect of this, given that I'm not familiar with Dreamweaver's features beyond "WYSIWYG editing".

My memory of Dreamweaver was that it didn’t do databases or FTP.

It may have added those features later, but I only used it back when .shtml “sheetmetal” was the state of the art.

I consulted for clients in early 2000 that would use "publish" in Dreamweaver to FTP (and maybe even SFTP[1]) upload their site, from what I recall.

1: I don't remember whether it was FTP over TLS or SSH FTP. You might assume the former, but this was a very weird age for file uploads, and I remember being surprised more than once...

I used CF Studio in the late 1990s and it had FTP/RDS/SourceSafe, some semblance of WYSIWYG, datasources/databases, etc. Can't see how Coda would even come close to being the OG without a very narrow definition of features. Dreamweaver had FTP/etc at various points.

Homesite had all of those as well.

Oh man I remember Homesite. I loved it.

Before that I used the old Netscape WISYWIG editor.

whats WISYWIG? Or is it supposed to be a play on the pronunciation of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) ?

What I See Yis What I Get. Obviously...

Just me mistyping WYSIWYG.

Amaya saved to the origin using either HTTP PUT or WebDAV and it dates from the 90s.

Yes. And lots of more purely text-editors also support(ed) that, FTP wasn't an exotic feature.

Yes it did, and more! It even came with exploitable binaries, thus earning the distinction of being the first HTML editor to compromise your website for you.

https://insecure.org/sploits/Microsoft.frontpage.insecuritie...

(Edit: I originally said it auto-installed this. I misremembered what was going on and corrected.)

This is about Frontpage, the parent post is about Dreamweaver.

Also it is misleading, the linked page is about the server-side Frontpage Extensions, if you used Frontpage as an HTML page editor you'd just get a static site which is as secure as any other site made of static HTML files.

I believe so. CF Studio also. Pretty sure I used the latter pre-2000.

It did.

It was actually a really sophisticated tool when it was released but it was more aimed at non-programmers in that it's primary usage was code generation. So those of use who prefer to write the code ourselves would have given it a wide berth.

I find it really interesting that I've been downvoted into oblivion for asking a question.

Something something history something something repeat it.

Or Frontpage.

And kdevelop in the early 2000s (and I think our has another name before that).

Dreamweaver and Frontpage were around in the last 90s.

I'm pretty sure my first HTML editor (Arachnophobia) which I used in 1995 or 96 sort of era supported those things too.

I used to love that editor. It was basically Notepad++ but HTML specific and written long before Notepad++ was a thing. And super fast too what with it being a Windows native application (back then - I think it was since rewritten in Java for whatever reason).

HoTMetaL was available pretty early on as well. ~1994-ish?

https://www.w3.org/Tools/HoTMetal.html

Having used Dreamweaver and the original Coda for work, they really weren’t comparable apps. Dreamweaver was all about layout and did complex layout things Coda never did, while Coda made most of the basics of web development (of that era) really easy.

For example, connecting to a remote server was a weird proprietary complex thing in Dreamweaver, whereas in Coda it was straight up basic FTP. And Coda even shipped with HTML and CSS reference manuals built in.

I used Frontpage a bit too. I have to say the handwringing here over which was “the first” is silly and a waste of time. Coda was, at least for this Mac user, a major step forward from Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. Panic is not a threat to Adobe... let them claim what they want IMO. No one needs to defend Dreamweaver.

Coda landed in a pretty short window in my web development world, between the end of using Dreamweaver templates, but before using git and local development workflows. I never tried Coda 2; I went to the command line for git and stayed there for nano, vim, SSH, etc.

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