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I would say Dreamweaver was OK, but it was eclipsed by the web-based CMS. Dreamweaver generated trash code when it was used as a DHTML design tool, but it was never as bad as FrontPage. When used in design-mode it would build up a model internally, and then try to generate code that it could later roundtrip. This worked when things were isolated, but as complexity grew it stopped working and was hard to debug.

I saw it work reasonably well when someone took a code-first approach with the overall website templates which avoided the mess from building these up using DW's code generation. You could then set it up so people could only mess with the certain parts of the page which avoided the overall site getting messed up as you added others. This got cleaner when they introduced Contribute.

Dreamweaver was created for a time when there was still a webmaster-type role in companies. These people didn't necessarily have what we'd consider a strong dev skillset, but the world around them had started to change which explains the range of capabilities in Dreamweaver.

If you want to see some terrible server-side code generation, you should checkout Drumbeat (https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Drumbeat).



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