Hyperlinks in Preview failing to connect.

[Megan R]

Hi. I teach Dreamweaver, and my students and I are experiencing a problem with some hyperlinks not opening web pages in the preview. We are using Dreamweaver 2021 which is the most up to date for us. For example wikipedia hyperlinks will open and load the page without issue, but youtube immediately opens a light gray screen and says failed to connect. The tags and links are in the exact same format and order for both. Is there a change in Dreamweaver that's caused this? In the attached pictures, the links under favorite time of day and favorite song are receiving the failed to connect gray screen.

[Jon Fritz · Accepted solution]

Please, for the sake of your students, look into retiring the idea of "teaching Dreamweaver" it's essentially EOL software and won't help your students much if looking into a career in website design. Adobe has moved DW to a minimum maintenance status. They are no longer doing any bug fixes or new features, instead only OS compatibility patches, possible security fixes, and some third party bolt-on library updates (that they're already woefully behind on).

It looks to me like Adobe's servers don't like Youtube, or Youtube doesn't like Adobe's servers. The IP address at the beginning of the URL in the location bar points to using DW's "Real Time Preview" which has always been a bit of a dumpster fire. It takes your code, sends it to Adobe's servers, then processes it and sends it back to your browsers in order to sometimes, maybe give you a glimpse of what your code changes should be doing, in real time. It barely ever functions as expected in a lot of situations, and really only saves your students a quick Ctrl+R to reload the browser after making changes.

Try going into Edit > Preferences > Real Time Preview and turning on "Default to Static Browser Preview". This will open the pages in the local browser without first running through Adobe's servers and should function correctly. 

[Megan R]

Thank you that fixed the problem we were having. I am trying my hardest to convince my school district to let me drop this class and teach another Adobe program instead. 

[Jon Fritz]

Dreamweaver can still be a useful tool, but changing to more of a "teaching HTML and CSS" mindset, would make it so it wouldn't matter what program your students eventually use. Knowing the whys and what-fors of coding is much more important than learning a program's featureset, at least, for anyone actually looking toward a career in the industry at some point. 

DW is dying in the vine. Adobe won't say when they plan to pull the plug officially. It's been coming since they announced the minimum maintenance status in a 2020 DW roundtable discussion.  They don't plan any kind of replacement as far as anyone has seen, which is probably the only reason they haven't totally dropped it yet.

[Nancy OShea]

1. REAL-TIME PREVIEW

Do not use Real-Time Preview (RTP) to test site performance.  Use plain old local Browser Preview.

Go to File > Open in Browser (select one from the list).

To permanently disable RTP, go to Edit > Preferences > Real-Time Preview > check the box for "Default to Static Browser Preview."

2. SUSPICIOUS LINKS 

Test all URLs first by copying & pasting them directly into your browser's address bar.  If the URL fails to resolve, it's a dead link.

Hope that helps.