So Tom Arah explains how in his view, Dreamweaver is dying.

The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically. Dynamically-generated web applications, from Amazon right down to the humble blog, all offer much more – in-built commenting, voting, RSS feeds, etc – than the best sites built on static HTML can ever hope to provide.

This isn’t a matter of bells and whistles, it’s absolutely fundamental. Ultimately a web site is all about content – posting it and making it findable – and Dreamweaver and the other static HTML editors have proven fundamentally flawed when it comes to these two core tasks (and features such as Dreamweaver’s libraries and templates are patches not solutions).

The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the navigation necessary to help users find it, just isn’t scalable or viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be posted by the content contributor, whether that’s the site owner or site visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around that content on the fly.

On some levels, he has some very good points. My summary, is that he is saying the static web is dead. I could not agree more. I am not sure of anyone offhand that even builds static pages professionally anymore. If you arent using some form of dynamic content, you are lagging way behind.

My issue I guess with this post, is how he is viewing Dreamweaver as an application tied only to static content. Dreamweaver is not the cause of static websites, nor is this its only use. I use Dreamweaver, Netbeans, and Aptana as IDE’s. These all make it much easier to manage site projects (including Drupal installs, and other CMS/Dynamic systems), auto-upload saved changes, track version changes, and so on. I do not view these (Although it should be noted that Dreamweaver is the only IDE I listed with WYSIWYG editing. The others are strictly code.) as simply page editors. They are development environments.

And his issue with the static pages should not be specifically linked with these programs. The mention of Drupal and the likes, is stated as though these are ready out of the box solutions for the majority of sites. In my experience this is not the case. First off, Drupal out of all the CMS’s, has the steepest learning curve to customize.

But do you need customizing? For any serious site and developer, the prepackaged themes on the Drupal site is not going to cut it. So when it comes to modifying and building CSS, viewing and editing source code… what are you going to do this in? For me, my answer is the trusty IDE. Not sure what Tom intends to use.

And I should state again, a serious site will come down to some level of editing. These CMS solutions are nice, and really helpful. But they are not without customization (core, plugin, or styling).

Edit: I guess it would be possible to get a Drupal install through a company or auto-install, never have to touch the config file, and then pay someone to design a theme (or just purchase one through a site). And never touch code through this process. When I think design though, I think custom, and I am doing it. So never touching code is not reality.

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