The local college and the local school that offers college courses offers web design as a course. Both these courses use Dreamweaver as the aid for students to help them in their learning. The only thing I have a gripe with is that the local courses for college credits list Dreamweaver as

the industry standard.

If you’re reading this article, I would like to hear your input. Do you think this is so? Is Dreamweaver the “industry standard” and if not, what are your thoughts? What would your “standard” be? What do you use in your aid and if you were the instructor, what would you use as your aid to help students learn web design?

Mine? Simple.

Designing With Web Standards 2nd Ed. by Jeffrey Zeldman
Bulletproof Web Design 2nd Ed. by Dan Cederholm
and CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Ed. by Eric Meyer

for the coding? I’d have students raw code. Yes, raw code. Why? You can learn more and a WYSIWYG’s browser view is off. I don’t know about the newest Dreamweaver, but in my experiences, a container can be off by a smidge, and with the leaps and bounds of CSS, things can look fine in browser view, but the time when you actually use a real browser, they can go awry.

I’d have students use Notepad or a simple HTML editor like Edit Plus or pNotepad or if on a Mac, bbEdit or Coda. I learned by using Notepad and I am glad I did. I used WYSIWYGs at one point, Front Page years and years ago (gasp!), early versions of Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc. One can only learn faster in my opinion, when using a text editor and not a WYSIWYG.

Use the web as a reference tool

There are so many sites out there one can learn from it’d take me days to write only a fraction of them. The first reference I would urge students to use? A List Apart. Bar none, the best out there now and probably for a long time coming.

CSS Discuss. Ask questions, read posts to the group, soak it all in. Only the best help is available there and I’ve used it as a tool in the past.

I don’t think Dreamweaver is the industry standard, it may be touted as is, it may be judged by some as the standard, but I don’t believe there is a standard tool for editing web pages. “To each his own.” A designer/developer may use bbEdit or Notepad or even Dreamweaver, but a label as such is narrow-minded.

I’d like to see some of the works of the students and see what instructors are teaching people around here. It can only be really good and standards for the web are being taught, or it can be downright horrible and there could be another group of people pumping out invalid code with tables nested in tables galore.

I urge people to nudge their instructor(s) to use only the latest methods, the latest tools or tools you are comfortable with to learn web design. I learned while getting my Associates degree on a Mac using Mac IE 4.2 if that says anything. I urged the IT department to use Firefox (which at the time was in its infancy) but to no avail.

Remind your instructor also that there is more than one browser, more than one platform (MUST remember Linux!) and remind your instructor that tables are used for tabular data and not layouts. Div layouts are so much more flexible, easier to maintain and search engine-friendly. If they don’t, then point them to only the best article out there (and this article you’re reading as well).

This may sway a few, it may go unnoticed by the masses, who knows? Some courses though that have good intentions only come out with really bad curriculum. Unlike this course, which I would jump on in a heartbeat.

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