Simple Syntax Debugging

danc96371935  wrote I'm a publisher, so we just try and create resources for the products teachers are using.  DW wouldn't be my choice for teaching newbies.  Far from it, to be honest

There must be some disconnect between certain teachers who you target your books at, and actual real-world developers and web agencies. Personally I know a lot of web agencies, developers, students and teachers, and truly NO-ONE uses Dreamweaver to code with these days. No-one. The only people I know who use Dreamweaver are active on this forum.

A student of mine told me she had used DW while taking a basic web page coding class at her highschool a few years ago. Seems DW still lingers on in those places. Understandable, since most highschool teachers are quite... set in their ways, and will not/cannot keep up with the speed at which web development evolves.

Unfortunately that means teaching their students outdated techniques and software. Not always, of course; but more often than not it seems to be the case. Then again, who can blame them? Public school teachers are grossly underpaid, and required to put in a ridiculous number of hours outside teaching and prep. Everywhere, any country.

Dw is i think trying to target a specific type of user, (bootstrap, sass, git) and not those who write their own javascript, or very modern css. If your students are planning for a future in web development i would recommend re-assesing the use of Dw once Dw2018 is released.

I am not trying to say do not use Dw, just that students learning web development now, must think about advances in html/css/javascript in the next few years, which unfortunatly does not appear to be a priority for Dw development, but may change with the next version, as they are trying to play 'catch-up', (unfortunatly jumping over the inclussion of essentials).

pziecina  wrote The use of finding syntax errors in Dw 2017, (and 2015) is via linting, which personally i turn off as the linting rules used are simply how someone else thinks javascript should be written, and are often wrong anyway, especially if you use ecma 6 or greater. As for the javascript debugger, this requires Dw to be launched via the command line, or a custon link defined in the OS's start-up for Dw. Personally, (again) i would recommend using your browsers built-in dev tools, which is much easier to use, supports more modern version and does not show false errors, Dw's js debugger has not been updated since it was originally thought of in 2013.

Personally I thnk pretty much all linters, validators and debuggers are useless to a point, even more so in cases of pages with mixed languages - hey-ho what webpage doesnt use mixed language these days or does everyone still develop their html in an html file, css in a css file, php in a php file, javascript in a js file etc. I've tested out maybe 8+ bits of web-development software over the last couple of weeks and they all do it differently and come up with different variations. I would not rely on them, they maybe can provide some insight into a problem existing but locating that problem or understand what the debugger/validator is saying is another matter.

Happy coding, some of the best editors where those where you had to stand on your own 2 feet. These modern editors I don't really know about - they look the business but can also rain confusion....