css, 2 conflicting interests, and why I, You, and the Dw team get it wrong.

concerning the Al / OS last exchange... some times ago, I felt the same on a large number of exchange and especially when Al was answering, whether it's in response to one of my messages or to other people, and I thought to react... but time has past on, and I didn't do it... then I thought that I was alone on this perception.

I don't think that the term is 'insulting',

without wanting to offend you, or anyone else, that could feel to be concerned .... please do not take offense ... I feel in some remarks and the manner in which the answer are addressed to people a fairly condescending way.

maybe I'm wrong, and the language barrier is a big part of it, but that the first time that subscribers to a public forum, which I'm involved in, cause such embarrassment.

I think we are all here to exchange ideas and confront each other, to bring our differences, to compare uses by expressing wishes ... in some interventions, I have the impression that some answer explains that the others do not understand anything, and that only the one who answer can explain life to all.

again, my goal is not to attack anyone, but simply to inform of this feeling, certainly that many of us on this forum do not know native English, and that makes even more participation in these exchanges very unpleasant.

Can we call this didcussion finished?

All everyone is doing now is repeating previous posts, or saying, "no I don't, yes you do", and the discussion is going nowhere.

OS said

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Nancy+OShea  wrote

3)  It was not so long ago that DW users like Paula and David Powers, Massimo Forti and others were writing custom DW Extensions and giving them away on their websites.   I had a great little extension that self-populated form Select lists with all the countries or all the states & provinces I needed.

I'm not taking about those kinds of extensions, they can be useful along with other scripts which remove blank lines from the code etc. I see them as superficial helpers, not something that forces particular workflows or method down your neck or as in the case of extensions can lead to lethagy leading to stagnation in ones progress and knowledege.

(SORRY I don't know how to answer to a particular message without having to get the full text... and just part of it... so all the above was said By OS and Nacy... so below is my feedback)

I usually use snippet for such a purpose

OFF TOPICS
Hello Paula, I've just had a Cabernet - Syrah for diner... woaw... purely semantic, stuffed with metadata of red fruits and undergrowth humus ...... accessible by everyone around the table and responsive to both glasses

This discussion has taken a right, whilst it was hoped it would take a step into bringing Dw and web development using any program into the future.

Yes I agree the removal of the extension manager was a terrible decision by Adobe, i also agree extensions can be helpful, but there are a number of areas in which Dw has terrible support, and extensions offer no support.

Just about everything in the html5 specs that has been added in the last 5 years has no support in Dw, and i have yet to see an extension that uses html5 semantic mark-up, or even uses srcset and/or picture. Then we come to what is wrongly known as css3, again some extensions use it, but as for creating css animations, grid layouts, shapes, and just about anything that is thought of as 'the way forward' by many professionals, they offer nothing. As for javascript api's, so that users can create browser based applications both Dw and extensions offer no help at all.

Extensions are not the way forward for most of the above items, coding is, and even thinking that Dw users could compete and earn a living in the next five years without those items being better supported is 'cloud cuckoo land'.

Even users of the 'quick site creation tool' are starting to question the time v return of creating sites, and unless Dw users stop thinking 'quick and easy' will help them to be competitive enough to stop the cheaper wordpress, site builder and bedroom coders taking their business, then they had better start re-training for another profession.

Well, it is hard to take part in such a discussion. That is right that I know you all by your various interventions on the CAB, but I do not really know what are your cultures and your deep personality.

That sometimes makes the comprehension of the humor subversive or not, the self-mockery, or just the simple provocation, not easy to capture for those of us that are not native English spoken.

That often makes the deep bottom line sometimes difficult to interpret. Therefore, to make the difference between a direct way of speaking or a gratuitous aggression.

Well that said,

Having no visibility on the real directives necessary for the average users of DW, nor the orientations of the entrepreneurial strategies concerning the Creative Cloud's audience. It is difficult to position oneself on the good or bad choices, of the successive versions of DW.

I remark that we are all just express our own subjectivity, based on our own and personal business.  I often read in this thread, "... developer, casual developer, designer (to interpret it by non-developer)... and so on.... ".

However, hey, one criteria that is not present is that whatever we consider ourselves in which case we are... One all have to support the company to which we are affiliate. For that, we have to render projects on time to satisfy our clients or partners. We have to render a service beyond their requirement. We have to preserve a value for money that is up to the market. We are often part of a team... and each member of this team generally does not have the same field of action, nor the same approach and vision of the web site construction than us... But, we all have to refer and use the same technologies by tools which at one point somehow DW is part. (at least for us on this forum)

Moreover, today, the notion of a website itself can be completely different. Depending on whether one are trying to present a newsletter, or building a one page site full of animation, parallax effects, transitions.... , or having a hard dynamic website 'à la papa' ('old fashion look and feel') completely PHP/SQL based, or a web application that meets innovative needs relying on 'modern' conception, or being distributed as a complete integrated mobile consultation...

We also must not forget that some of us will take into account the quality of a code, and being more demanding on that point. Unlike others that will not hesitate to copy / paste here and there sections of code (more or less questionable), taking into account only the final rendering being the emerged part of the site and which will make the final reference.

We should not forget that the structure is the first major and important point, and that the HTML code quality will arise a strong guarantee of durability, scalability, interpretability and so on.

Therefore, whatever the profiles that we do have, by using DW we should at least know and understand basics of robust and well-interpreted HTML, we also must be sensitive to the structure, to the DOM, and to a real content strategy.

In such a thinking, must DW be a simple text editor? a complete IDE? a base for receiving extensions?

Should DW be more designer oriented than developer, or vice versa, or have to answer as well to the one as to the other?

I think that only Adobe can position such answers, and, understand what the real needs of their users is. But, in any case, DW must be able to remain independent of any third technology, or addons. DW must be open to be usable with other crosscutting tools, being part of the Creative Cloud or not.

As far as I am concerned, I think that DW should in no way become a complete and autonomous tool. On the contrary, DW must propose tools and features that allows us to not rely, and depend, on any add-ons to produce content based on pure Mozdev and WhatWG standards (becoming later on w3c recommendations).

Having a real time editable rendering, having a drag drop components interface to build and reflect the content strategy, integrating in such a way most of the needed technologies is what DW propose since the Macromedia age to gain more pure designers users, and that is a great bridge. However, this should not exclude the minimum coding skills mentioned above. And DW must always be on the gap in terms of novelty and future recommendations

then for extra features (features above basic needs), should we use and rely on extensions or not?

The main question are, Does the use of extension is time saving for this project, does the extension really meets the goals expectations, does the extension cost remains financially acceptable, does the use of the extension offers real interoperability with the rest of the team or with their own skills. 

O/K, now we have no more posts concerning extensions, (hopefully now out of everyones system) here is that 'more to come' i hinted at in my original post.

css and html/javascript was thrown into turmoil 10 years ago, the cause of that turmoil was the iPhone, and with its introduction the mobile web was born. We however as web developers tried desperately to 'shoe horn' our old tried and tested methods of creating sites into the sites we created so they also catered for those mobile devices, with varying success, but we never did really come to terms with how to actually do it, and now just to make matters worse, we have a revolution happening at the other end of the scale, with 4k desktop monitors, smart tv's and 4k gaming consoles, (with built in browsers) becomming more and more common.

Large companys invented frameworks to make development 'easier', promoted the use of pre/post-processors and as a result a generation of new developers never bothered, or thought they did not need to think about the future, or what was happening outside of those 'helper' tools. Even those with very little design or coding knowledge could get into rwd, and many did so thinking that the framework was how thing were supposed to be, and if you mentioned css to them, they looked at you with a blank expression as pre/post-processor code was all they knew, (what is this thing called css).

Programs such as Dw, have now embraced the framework, and incorporated many of the features users of them require, but in doing so abandoned the user requirering a semi-visual environment, the coder, the future, and to a large extent anyone who does not buy into the one size fits all way of working, and the tools Dw provides. They have done this at the same time programs such as VS have moved such features and tools they now provide to individual extensions, with the reasons given including, 'not every user requires them or wants them anymore', and 'the original reasons for including them, no longer exists'.

SO -

We now have dedicated css layout modules, css that can be conditionally included using css, css features that no framework includes, css that enhance a sites end users experiance, across all devices, viewports and resolutions. Even html and accessibility has moved on from those early days, (of 10 years ago) and browsers are starting to 'ignore' badly written javascript.

The question all the above asks is, why has Dw become what it is and is it worth my or anyone elses time who does not fit into Dw's 'vision'?

I would say NO, but then again i develop in components, not sites. I would also say YES, if i did not know how to use the css layout modules, modern css, html5 or was not interested in accessibility. I would also say NO if i was developing database driven sites, but YES if i was happy using extensions for server-side code.

There is no definitive answer to the above question, as everyone is different, working in different environments from single self-employed users to small 2-5 person teams, and working with different sized budgets from a few hundred to budgets that make the Ps budget look like petty-cash.

pziecina  wrote If you watch - https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/19908t_876d7009-77fb-4a67-86bc-70475fddf88e/?autoplay=true

30mins in and all I saw was some 'charlie' faffing around with some 3rd party Bootstrap snippets and using jquery 1.11.3..........??????????? .............yawn.

pziecina  wrote The Principal Dw product manager, is also responsible for the Brackets project. This means that he is probably more of a coder than a designer, but like Peter Linss of the css working group thinking that the specs from css grid layouts makes the feature more accessible to designers, does it really? This is no insult to the Principle Dw product manager, as I am just as guilty as he is of the following -

The DW Product Manager is obviously a large part of the problem. The fact that he does not interact with customers, and people like you, on this forum, is telling. The fact that he is in charge of Brackets is a little frightening, as Brackets is not even close to tools like Visual Studio and Aptana. The video, as hard as it was to follow, finally casts some light on why Dreamweaver is floundering, and it's a real shame.