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The Dreamweaver Syndrome

Posted by Raoul Snyman on January 26, 2007 on 10:38 pm | In (X)HTML, Accessibility, CSS, Design |

(Opinion) It is my personal opinion that Dreamweaver breeds bad design. I have enough circumstantial evidence for that. Too many web “designers” use Dreamweaver, and although you can produce standards compliant designs, too many designers rely heavily on the WYSIWYG part of Dreamweaver. And this means that we get Internet Explorer-only designs that are full of tables and HTML attributes and inline CSS.

These are some of the things I see that Dreamweaver designers do:

• Font heights in pixels
  This is a no-no in web design. If you set your font sizes in pixels, the majority of users will not be able to resize their web sites. This is because most people still use Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer does not resize fonts set in pixels. This is an accessibility problem, because what happens if you have a visitor to your site who can’t see too well, and he always increases his font size? Now he can’t read your site because the font size doesn’t change.
• Fixed heights of divs
  Some sites have nice headers and headings. But then when you resize your font, your heading doesn’t resize, and now you can’t read what’s written there because it’s been cut off or it overflows outside the box it’s in (that’s if you didn’t have your font size fixed).
• Tables
  The arch enemy of standards compliant web design. Tables should be used in nothing other than tabular data. Forms should not use tables. Forms should be laid out properly (have a look at the way Drupal does it).
• HTML Attributes
  Since the invention of CSS, and certainly since CSS version 2, there is no need for presentation in HTML. Dreamweaver nicely makes your page look like you want it, and inserts HTML attributes all over. Want your text centered? Dreamweaver inserts align=”center”.
• Incorrect use of CSS
  One divhad an id so that it would display shadow, and so when the designer wanted to have another shadow, they just added another div with the same id. Um, no, I’m sorry. That’s invalid CSS. id’s may only be used ONCE in a document.
• Inline CSS
  While not strictly a no-no, inline CSS is discouraged because it defeats the purpose of CSS, that being all your presentation styles being separate from the document, so that you can change what your site looks like by simply changing one file.

Now, I know that there are people out there that use Dreamweaver and make good, standards-compliant, best practices designs, but unfortunately they are generally far out-weighed by the number of wannabe web designers. And, while a lot of the time these web designers can product valid code, it’s not necessarily good code.

Real web designers don’t think in pictures, they think in CSS ;-).