I have discovered a use for Dreamweaver’s design view (no really)
categories: front-end development
I just got a request to edit a static page that showed several of a company's employees. Turns out that a bunch of them aren't employees anymore, and the client wanted the page to be updated. I knew before I even opened it that the content was going to be in tables (nested nested tables, in fact), and that rearranging it would be a giant pain.
Dreamweaver design view to the rescue. This thing was made for tables, and in no time I was able to delete what needed to be deleted and rearrange the remaining employees without leaving empty table cells. I didn't need to navigate nasty table HTML, and I didn't have to worry about accidentally deleting a crucial td that would bring the page to its knees. A quick preview in the browser verified that no harm had been done in my brief foray into design view, and the job was done.
Let it be said: Design view is evil and awful; it seeks to make front-end development accessible to people who have no business going anywhere near front-end development. But it's a good tool to have in the toolbox when you're faced with editing a table-based page, even if you just use it to find your bearings in the mess of tags.
Related posts: front-end development
- Centering images - June 13th, 2008
- Could the brilliant people at Google please just solve this already? - June 6th, 2008
- Another cautionary remote Javascript tale - May 18th, 2008
January 18th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Never!
http://pedanticweb.com/tablelesslayout/
February 16th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Um, Kev, I can’t work out if you’re being serious or not, particularly as you can’t spell ’satire’.
But back on topic, I don’t actually ever use Design View, but I do find Split View useful for automatically creating paragraphs as you type content, for easily creating lists and for adding links. Anything that saves typing characters is a good thing.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I like it because, especially on large pages, I can place my cursor in the area I want to go to in design view and code view automatically jumps to where I need to be.
There’s also a great tool within design view if you go in that horrid (I think it’s called) layout view. Where you can actually blow some of those nested tables away safely. I hadn’t seen it before but it can be good for terrible inherited pages.