May 22, 2008

Dreamweaver 'Next' at WebVisions 2008

I'll be presenting on web design best practices/standards (along with a sneak peek of the next version of Dreamweaver) today @1:15pm at the WebVisions conference in Portland, should you be attending. Swing by, get an early look at what we've been working on back in the Dreamlabs, along with a lot of thoughts as to WHY we've been doing what we've doing with Dreamweaver. Aside from my own plug, the WebVisions track/session schedule looks great, with a speaker list that reads like a virtual who's-who of web luminaries. Given I'm up against folks like Bryan Veloso, Dan Rubin, Roger Black and Aaron Gustafson during my session hour, I'm both excited at the quality and density of content at WebVisions this year- and simultaneously bummed at what I'll miss even in the hour I'm onstage.

Currently I'm in Dave McFarland's "JavaScript for Designers" session, which is starting off quite nicely (great slides, too), but will probably be lurking in the lounge area between sessions catching up on email and feeds. Tap me on the shoulder if you're here and say hey!

Posted by sfegette at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2008

Farewell, GoLive

Although it's long been rumored, today the news was officially delivered- GoLive will no longer be sold as of today (April 28th, 2008), and the focus will shift to Dreamweaver long-term for Adobe's professional web design & development customers. This is news that I'm reasonably certain most GoLive users saw coming as far back as the CS3 launch- when Dreamweaver replaced GoLive in the Creative Suite packages - but it's good to finally have an official word on the matter. GoLive (versions 5, 6, CS2 and 9) customers can take advantage of a $199 cross-grade special (same price as a Dreamweaver upgrade, basically) to pick up Dreamweaver CS3, which means there'll be a lot of GoLive customers considering Dreamweaver now.

There's been a lot of speculation on if and when this would happen - and if so, why - so I wanted to at least give a little perspective on this from my vantage point - as a long-time Dreamweaver team member - on two of the main concerns I've heard around Dreamweaver taking the helm of our web design products.

Lack of Competition

Ever since the Macromedia acquisition, I've heard the pretty regular concern that Adobe's competitors were systematically being eliminated, leaving the competitive landscape around our products bleak and quite frankly - non-competitive. Honestly, I couldn't see that more differently - competitors are all around if you care to look for them- from lightweight web design/development apps like Coda, CSSEdit and others, to full-blown IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. For design-centric web developers, apps like Freeway and the reasonably-newer Expression Web are viable options. GoLive was a worthy competitor, but lately we've even more competing tools to consider as we build out Dreamweaver's roadmap, not less. That can only be a good thing for the competitive web design landscape - and Dreamweaver's future within it - in my opinion.

Coders vs Designers

Web design has increasingly become a more technical discipline over the years, and Dreamweaver's secret to success was always to follow what the pro web designers were doing on a project and workflow basis, and enable that within our tools. We occasionally hear criticism that Dreamweaver isn't 'WYSIWYG enough', or needs to support more drag-and-drop features and get away from the code. But that's not what the pro web design market has been telling us - web design is not like print design, or even Flash design. When was the last time you needed to hack your InDesign files to print correctly on that one, finicky printer? Web browsers are OUR printers, and they sure as heck don't always play as nicely with one another- let alone render the same way even on the best of days. Visual tools can get you 90% of the way there with the current browser landscape- but that remaining 10% of your headache is almost always code-based- a browser hack inserted into the stylesheet or perhaps some judicious markup-juggling to get that layout working correctly. And when this bites you, you absolutely, positively, have to have access to your code. Plain and simple. Sure, a lot of print designers have become accustomed to GoLive's more visual model, but at the end of the day Dreamweaver has to serve it's primary market - professional web designers and developers - and the market spoke quite loudly on that subject years ago. We're just following their lead, honestly.

But I'm sure there's lots of good ideas to consider now too, do you have favorite GoLive features that you'd like the DW team to consider going forward? If so, please use our bug/wish list form here to send them in for consideration (always the most direct path to getting a request into the teams here, FYI):

http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

So What's Next?

This will undoubtedly be a period of transition as there's a lot of GoLive users who are now considering Dreamweaver, and we'd like to make sure that your transition's a smooth one. I strongly recommend checking out the resources we've made available at the following URL:

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/switch

These include:

Indeed, there's a lot of areas of difference between GoLive and Dreamweaver, but hopefully these bits of info will help you make the most sense of them quickly.

For the Dreamweaver team, we've already seen many of the GoLive engineers join our ranks, who are all contributing quite a bit to the next release of Dreamweaver already. It's been a pretty smooth transition internally, and is resulting in one amazing team. However, I realize that this news may be much more upsetting to you, but sincerely hope that the the transition is as painless as possible. Let us know how we can help?

Posted by sfegette at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2008

Random News Items

I've been pretty hectic between travel and SxSW the last couple weeks, but a few cool items of note may have slipped past. Catching up now...

Anyway, since I didn't feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general 'wish you were here' posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.

Posted by sfegette at 04:35 PM | Comments (5)

March 04, 2008

Pros and Cons of Unobtrusive JavaScript?

Web developer Steve Stringer contacted me last week, and was interested in a point-counterpoint discussion on the merits of unobtrusive JavaScript (or lack thereof), and both myself and author Dave McFarland (Dreamweaver MX - The Missing Manual) took him up on it. You can read the results at Steve's StringFoo blog here - and by all means please jump into the comments if you have strong opinions one way or the other. (I'll refrain from further commentary here, as I pretty much summed my opinions up in the article, and would prefer to channel followup conversation to the article itself, too.)

Thanks for the opportunity, Steve!

Update: Sorry for the broken link, folks- fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up!

Posted by sfegette at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2008

2 Bits of Browser News

First - and probably most surprising - the Internet Explorer 8 team just announced the reversal of the year. Instead of IE8 rendering in IE7 compatibility mode by default (and requiring a meta tag/header to 'turn on' IE8 compliance), the IE team just announced that IE8 will interpret web content in the most forward-looking, standards-compliant way that it can. The community has been very vocal about this, so it's great to see the IE team not just listen, but respond directly to the negative feedback. To be clear, there was definitely a split in the standards community on the subject, but at the end of the day I can't help but feel that having IE render more closely to standards by default is the right thing to do.

Secondly, the Web Standards Project (aka WaSP) just announced that the Acid3 browser test is now available, providing yet another benchmark for compliance for the browser vendors as a whole to refer to. IE8, for the record, recently passed the Acid2 test, but Drew hints that 'work is already underway based on the Acid3 previews', which is heartening to hear as well. Let's hope all the browser vendors take Acid3 to heart, as a world with far less cross-browser rendering headaches is a world I'd really like to live in.

Posted by sfegette at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2008

WaSP Bike-Hugger BBQ at SXSW 08

Headed to SXSW '08 this year? I know I am, and I generally try to hit any/all WaSP-related events open to the public as I'm a bit obsessed with standards, personally speaking. Fortunately this year there's more than just the annual meeting, the Web Standards Project are also hosting a barbecue event right across from the main event hall.

Because there's so much going on in the world wide web today (IE8, HTML5), this year we're doing an additional event: the Bike Hugger Beer & BBQ. It's open to all SXSW interactive attendees, with free beer, free food and free (?) WaSP members present to discuss the state of the browser landscape.

This will be similar to the WaSP Cafés which, by the by, have been held in Tokyo, France and Spain over the last year, with 2008's first WaSP Café (held in Paris) having a grand total of 70 people attending!

The core topic for the WaSP discussion will be the IE8 versioning proposal, which clearly has been a hot topic since the very moment it was announced on A List Apart. All the WaSPs that will be at SXSW will be present, so we hope to see you there as well!

More details on the event can be found on the WaSP site, of course.

Only downer for me is that I won't be flying in until Saturday afternoon due to another speaking gig back in the Bay Area, but I'll be trying to go straight here from the airport. Hope to see you there!

Posted by sfegette at 11:59 AM | Comments (3)

December 19, 2007

IE8 - Credit where Credit's Due

After a week of highly polarized reactions to the recent Opera complaint against Microsoft, you've got to give some long overdue props to Microsoft's Internet Explorer team for pushing forward and finally announcing that internal builds of IE 8 have finally passed the Acid2 test, even if just internally for now. You can read the news from Dean Hachamovitch here, and Molly Holzschlag's report from the trenches here. Here's hoping IE8 gets out into the wild quickly.

Posted by sfegette at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2007

Opera Takes Aim at Internet Explorer

Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software, has leveled a blast directly at Microsoft's Internet Explorer as of today in the form of a formal antitrust complaint- calling them to task for both not adequately supporting web standards, as well as the direct ties between IE and the Windows operating system. You can get more context on this complaint directly from the open letter on his weblog, as well.

One of the key tenets of the complaint is IE's failure to pass the Acid2 test, the most prominent test case to date for determining a user agent's adherance to the W3C HTML/CSS 2 specs. All other significant modern browsers have successfully passed the Acid2 test case (Gecko-based browsers expected to fall in line with the current 1.9 spec, to be implemented in Firefox 3 among others), however the IE team has publicly noted they do not consider Acid2 a true test of standards compliance, but a 'wish list of features'. That characterization is one I've never quite agreed with. Acid2 is a lot more than just a laundry list of 'nice-to-have' features, in my opinion- and more a list of 'need-to-have' features.

That being said, I do feel that Internet Explorer has come a long way with version 7 (despite still receiving the brunt of browser-based designers/developers' ire for it's remaining shortcomings), and have hopes that the recently-hinted-at IE 8 will come even closer to compliance, but would also hope that passing the Acid2 test becomes a reality with that release.

Now although I would hope to see ALL browser vendors (including IE) recognize Acid2 as at least a common target for verifying baseline standards-compliance (and was personally a bit bummed to see it dismissed by the IE team specifically during the IE 7 cycle), I'm not sure I can get entirely behind Hakon's argument that IE's existence alone is limiting choice for the Windows community, as both Opera and Firefox have no problems on that platform- at least as far as I can tell. I've chosen to use Firefox on Windows myself, and had no issues in doing so.

Microsoft's Chris Wilson was pretty straightforward (over 2 years ago, in fact) as to why IE 7 did not consider Acid2 compliance a top priority for that release, to be fair. And I know that there's always a balance to be struck between strict adherance to specs and the top issues your customers face - we develop software here at Adobe too, and compromises are always involved - but an antitrust complaint suggests the strategy is more one of the oft-cited 'embrace, extend, destroy' practice Microsoft has been called on in the past, notably during the Netscape/IE dogfighting during the mid-to-late 90's. I'm not sure I totally agree here, either. Both Chris and Molly have been effecting quite a bit of positive change in Internet Explorer and I'd like to keep a positive attitude about where things are headed. However, even Molly has recently taken Bill Gates to task on the degree of transparency the IE team has been exhibiting lately, so maybe there's something to Opera's argument beside saber-rattling. Couldn't say, personally. But I will be paying a lot closer attention now.

Is Opera's formal complaint against IE simply an aggressive plea for consistency among the browser developers, or the first warning shots across the bow before Browser Wars 2008 kick in? Will other vendors join into the fray? Interesting developments in the standards community these days, to say the least.

What do you think?

Posted by sfegette at 11:38 AM | Comments (1)