Thursday 2002.5.9
I've been a little worst for wear but just now I managed to download the Dreaweaver trial (OS X) and give it a whirl. I'm a tad disappointed after having high hopes for it during the demo Allaire Macromedia gave yesterday..
Most of the time now I'm writing XSLT and XSL-FO - out of the box Dreamweaver doesn't, not that I expected it to have XSLT Code Hinting built in, but I had to manually hack an XML configuration file so it would recognise the ".xsl" extension as a XML document and get some syntax colouring etc. The HTML Code Hinting of course wasn't smart enough to read my xsl:output and see that the output that I was defining was HTML 4.01 transitional and instead gave me hinting for XHTML 1.0 Strict. Later it completely mangled my code - TOTAL CHAOS - horrible mess.
The nice thing about Dreamweaver is you can get down and dirty and write your own extensions and get it to do what you want but BBedit seems the less stressfully option right now.. I still have an open mind so I'll give it another shot next week when I get some time.
It's always seemed a bit daft to me that a company invests millions of dollars and hundreds of man years to write some software that is so complex you need to do a course to figure out how to use the software - the sole purpose of said software being to hide a simple markup language which has a handful of tags.. such that if the user had expended the same amount of time and energy learning the tags as they did learning the software that hides the tags, then the user wouldn't need the software.. I know that's an exaggeration, but the irony still doesn't escape me. 
