I'm trying out Macromedia Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG HTML editor, this morning. It's okay. It doesn't seem as intuitive as Visual Page, which is what I normally use, and it has some weird--make that very weird--quirks, like not allowing me to make more than one space after a period. Call me wacky, but I don't like software to make those decisions for me. I don't like Microsoft Word deciding that when I type a capital C, I really want a copyright symbol, and I don't like Dreamweaver deciding that I really don't want two spaces. I really do. I don't particularly care if that's not "correct" according to whoever makes these kinds of decisions.

The toolbars are in the way and you can't dock them. I like working in full screen mode most of the time, but with these floating toolbars all over the place, that's almost impossible. The screen feels very cluttered. Maybe that's just because I'm not used to it. I still haven't figured out how to bring the text in from the edges of the interior table. I can go into the source code and do that, I guess . . .

Okay, this is weird. You can't change the sourcecode from within Dreamweaver, you have to open a separate external application. You can view the sourcecode from within the editor, and it appears that you can make changes to it, but they don't affect the document you're working on. And I'm just now discovering that the refresh rate slows down a lot as I'm typing. The more text I enter, the slower it gets until it's just really crawling along now.

The part about not being able to edit the code is really annoying, and so is the lag behind my typing. It may be a memory issue, but there should be plenty of memory on this machine. I don't have this problem on the laptop, using VisualPage, and I have a lot less memory on it, and often have five or six applications going at once.

Bottom line: I can live with it, if I have to, but on a cursory examination, creating a simple page, I much prefer VisualPage.