I have used Freeway since version 1, in 1997. I have used Dreamweaver
for one project, because my client created the site in that and I had
to untwist it into something that worked. I don’t recommend it,
because its WYSIWYG view is not that great, and its generators make
pretty awful code. It demands that you understand HTML at quite a high
level in order to get professional results, and at that point you’re
much better off with a good programmer’s editor like TextMate (which
has all sorts of code completion goodies) or BBEdit (which includes a
whole raft of coding widgets too). At least then, when your final
product doesn’t look right, you have some idea how to fix it, rather
than having Dreamweaver’s “WYSIWYG” editor run the code through a
Cuisinart trying to get where you want to be.
Freeway is another animal altogether. It generates HTML, but cannot
read it at all. It’s very similar to QuarkXPress in how it approaches
the problem of Web design, because instead of using HTML (a very
simple language, with more value as an outlining tool than a pixel-
perfect layout tool) to hold its designs, it uses a modern object
model instead. Then, just as Quark doesn’t read the PostScript code
that it sent to the printer and use that to create the page layout,
Freeway doesn’t care at all about the HTML it just wrote when you
chose Publish from the File menu. It has a much higher-level model of
the page, and then “dumbs that down” for HTML’s benefit when you ask
it to. Each time you make any change – a 1px nudge in one direction,
even – Freeway throws out all of the HTML it just wrote, and starts
over from nothing. The result is code that is always as optimized as
it can be, rather than code that has been retrofitted many times over
to force it to do something it wasn’t originally intended to do.
A lot of my work now has moved well beyond the static page, into the
realms of database-driven Web Applications. So when I am working on
such a project in Rails or my PHP Rails-clone framework, I use
TextMate and CSSEdit and that’s it. But when I am trying to crank out
a bunch of designs to impress a new client, and hopefully to get them
to choose one, I use Freeway. It is the fastest, most precise, and
most Mac-like tool there is for expressing yourself in HTML.
Walter
On Jun 16, 2011, at 4:50 PM, Colorondemand wrote:
Walter,
I am new to web design. I have been working the so-called DTP
business for many years. My program of choice was Quark. I am
getting comfortable with Freeway and I have begun to dabble with
DreamWeaver. Do you use Freeway exclusively? What other web design
programs do you use?
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