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Dreamweaver Strengths and Weaknesses
The first and most obvious strength of Adobe's Dreamweaver is mind share. Over a million professional Web designers use Dreamweaver today for building Web sites. The key word here is professional. I am not including the people who dabble with or who have built Web sites with Microsoft Power Point or Word; no, I am talking about people who get paid to design Web sites. These people have chosen to support Dreamweaver.
The reasons are clear: Dreamweaver has a wonderful design surface upon which you can creatively design solutions. Dreamweaver tightly integrates with graphics tools such as Fireworks, and it has a host of tools a designer needs to build a web site. The following image shows the design workspace and some of the tools you can use.
However, the tool has been greatly extended to do a lot of the things it was never meant to do. The main challenge is support for Server Side scripting models, such as PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion. With the exception of ColdFusion, the server support is very weak. For instance, the support for ASP.NET does not include ASP.NET 2.0, and PHP support has come under a lot of criticism over the years.
Overall, however, Dreamweaver is a good tool. Hopefully, it will not get lost in the shine of Adobe's other darlings such as PhotoShop, Acrobat, and Flash.
The Strengths and Weaknesses of Expression Web Designer
Let's start with Expression Web Designers' weaknesses.
The first, as I mentioned above, is mind share. We all ask the question, "has Microsoft simply renamed FrontPage?" This is a serious question, as FrontPage is not hot on standards, has often wanted to re-write source code, and has those dubious "FrontPage Server Extensions" to worry about. Fortunately, Expression Web Designer is not a new face to FrontPAge. Phew!
The next weakness is that Expression Web Designer is a Windows-only solution. You will not be able to run Web Designer on a Mac. This is a shame, as a lot of designers are Mac users. One reason why Dreamweaver has been so successful, over the years, is that it runs identically on a Mac and PC.
The final sticking point is that Web Designer only supports ASP.NET 2.0 for the server tools. Sorry, no PHP or JSP support here.
All right, it is easy to throw stones at Microsoft. Let's take a breath and objectively look at the strengths of Expression Web Designer.
When you open Expression Web Designer, the first impression you have is the Design Interface. It truly displays content correctly on the screen (Dreamweaver can often be more than a little hazy in this regard). You will find that, as you begin your page layout, Microsoft gently nudges you into using standards. Unless you get in and code by hand, Web Designer does not allow you design a page that is not CSS- or accessibility-compliant. This is no small achievement. Dreamweaver has been wrestling for years on how to add easy support for CSS and accessibility, without you having to take a night course in the two technologies.
The next surprise is the easy support for other web tools, most notably for Dreamweaver. In the following image you see the same site created for the Dreamweaver screen shot used above. I used a lot of Dreamweaver tools, such as Dreamweaver Templates and DWT files, to lay out the design for the site. Expression Web Designer allows me to integrate with a Dreamweaver site and even use and apply DWT files, or Dynamic Web Templates as they are called in Web Designer. There is no change in source code. I can pop out of Expression Web Designer and pop back in to Dreamweaver and continue as if nothing had happened.
Unlike Dreamweaver, Expression Web Designer is not built on a legacy of changing standards. Expression Web Designer was built from the ground up to support Web 2.0 and the standards for today. You will not find support for legacy standards, such as the FONT tag, BLINK tag, and B, for bold, tag.
Expression Web Designer does tightly integrate with development tools such as Visual Studio Web Developer Express and Visual Studio 2005. The following example shows an ASP.NET control is an Expression Web Design page.
The following screen shows Visual Studio 2005 Web Developer Express rendering the same screen with the same control. The two programs happily jump back and forth. The design is controlled by Expression Web Designer and the application development is controlled by Visual Studio. There is true round trip support between the different products.
Who Wins?
Expression Web Designer is not FrontPage. It is a professional tool. The signs are all there: strong support for standards, support for CSS, support for development tools and tight integration with Enterprise development tools such as Visual Studio.
Dreamweaver, meanwhile, is also demonstrating that it is not a coach potato. Adobe has re-done Dreamweaver's design surface to support CSS first and foremost, with a huge amount of support for accessibility. In addition, the work Adobe is conducting with Flex, AJAX and Eclipse is demonstrating their commitment to a world where rich experience matters as well as standards.
In the War of the Web Designer tools, Microsoft has two battles to fight. The first is to prove that their new product is as good as, or better than, Dreamweaver. The second larger battle is winning mind share. Rightly or wrongly, Microsoft has not gained great support from the professional designer community for products such as FrontPage. I mean, let's face it, as a professional designer, if you saw someone trying to sell themselves as a Web Designer but they used FrontPage to do all of their work, you were likely to snicker to yourself and pass off the "would be" designer. Close, mate, but no cigar.
Microsoft has to prove that Expression Web Designer is a better product that Dreamweaver not by inches but by leaps and bounds.
There is no mistake that Adobe and Microsoft are setting the battle field and will square off against each other. In this new war of Web designer tools, Microsoft is looking a lot like David and Adobe is looking like a limber and strong Goliath.
Let the rumble begin.
Matthew has written four Flash books, contributed to a dozen Web books, and has published over 400 articles. He is passionate about exposing Internet's potential for all of us. Matthew works directly with many companies as a business strategist coaching IT architects and business leaders to work tightly with each other towards common goals.
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Source:Digital Media Online.
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