Excel is a great example of how “low code” or “no code” are recent buzzwords for a long continuing evolution. There have long been attempts to make software development more accessible. Some attempts stuck (Crystal Reports 1984, Excel 1987, WordPress 2003, IFTTT 2010) while others did not (HyperCard 1987, FrontPage 1995). The same will be true for the current crop of platforms.
Not as villain as Dreamweaver. Not directly but considering how MS saw that has no future and abandoned it, while Dreamweaver became the "web dev tool" for many, many out there for long years until Adobe understood those tools had no future at all.
Pfft. Dreamweaver (and even FrontPage) were perfectly fine back in the pre-IE6 days when they dominated.
People today crap on using <TABLE>'s for grid formatting, just as we crap on 1990's Java code for its `AbstractStrategyFactoryFactory` excesses. Because it's "what people did back in the bad old days", and is a glaring red flag that one's skills are out of date.
But whereas OO design patterns are a matter of subjective debate, early HTML4 and prior just flat out didn't have modern mechanism for separating presentation and content. CSS 1.x was very limited, and no major web browser even seriously supported that until the year 2000. CSS 2.x didn't get real until the 2010's.
Would any professional use Dreamweaver today? Of course not. But it was an appropriate tool for its time.
FrontPage from day one generated garbage that only IE could read, on purpose. The other day I found a notebook from my high school days in which I attached a "Best viewed in your own browser" sticker to mock the best viewed on IE (and also Netscape) buttons that were the rage back in the day (pre-2000).
