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Comment by SpaceDragon | Hacker News Reader

I use Dreamweaver practically everyday, it's industry leading software, but it's not irreplaceable.

I've tried Microsoft's Expression software and feel is a viable alternative for a one-time price of $79 smackers.

If I get an itch to upgrade, it won't be to rent Adobe software.

Dreamweaver is an industry standard? I don't know of anyone working web dev using dreamweaver (I've always thought of it as a teaching/hobbyist tool akin to, though obviously better than, FrontPage).

It's the only visual web tool I've seen which generates clean HTML/CSS.

Dreamweaver sits right next to Sublime Text 2 in my toolbox and is great for visual layouts. (Saves a lot of typing.) I then switch over to Sublime or something else to hook them up.

Do newer versions output better HTML? Because it's pretty obvious to me when a site has been generated, and when it's been coded manually. I'm sick of seeing everywhere, and CSS rules being called style1, style2, etc.

Back when I was a kid, I'd play with Dreamweaver and then go back and clean up the generated HTML, which went OK. It wasn't a bad workflow, but as an adult I do it all by hand of course.

Yes. It's pretty sane these days.

I started off with Dreamweaver but very quickly had to move to Text Editors because the I had very little control over the generated HTML. While it was great for cases where I am mixing static HTML pages with little design, but whenever there was JS, decently complicated CSS or Server Side Scripting involved DW became largely useless as I had to modify generated source and at times, rewrite it.

Photoshop generates HTML/CSS, but I would imagine it's even worse than Dreamweaver's generated code. It sounds like you're tidying up the generated markup anyway - after a few runs I imagine you'd be pretty close to giving it a go from scratch?

It's like generated scaffold code. A quick way to get a good percentage along the way and then dip in and hand-tweak it from there.

For me the DW generated code is clean enough that there's really no "re-doing" stuff, just extending and refining.

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