Do you remember a thing called Dreamweaver? A decade ago it was a popular tool by Macromedia for building web sites, succeeding the infamous Microsoft Frontpage. It managed to output something that remotely resembled web sites, although the produced markup turned out to be a pile of garbage.
Dreamweaver was later acquired by Adobe who continued the development of this thing for unknown reasons. Now Adobe are back again with a software for creating web pages without any coding involved.
Adobe Muse is based on Adobe Air and will allow people to drag and drop components on a layout pane similar to Indesign. At a first glance it seems to be all about fixed dimensions, at a time when most of the modern web developers are talking about Responsive Web Design.
The code is claimed to be standards-based, but I had a look at some sites including Adobes own Muse-site. It was like using a time-machine going a decade back in time and looking at Dreamweaver-generated code. “The horror”, as Kurtz would say.
Despite the product name, I doubt whether this will inspire anyone to great creations.
Divine inspiration may come in many shapes, but always question the source.
Half a decade ago many people were finally waking up from the nineties and replaced table based layouts with a lot of div elements, since it was thought to be more semantic. But unfortunately this good intention was just replacing the infamous “tag soup” with “div soup”.
Today it’s 2011 and even though Adobes Muse-site is very simple, it contains 223 div elements. Some look like this one:
If a tool can help someone to create great things and make the web a better place, that’s awesome. But I think this one is a step in the wrong direction.
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