2006 in review: the editor was the workflow

I built every site this year inside Dreamweaver 8, and that is the most honest description of my 2006 I can give.

The editor was the workflow. It held the site definition, the FTP credentials, the template system, and, in a sync file it wrote per folder, the record of which files it had already put on the server.

What that actually gave me

More than I would like to admit. Site-wide templates with editable regions, so a header change propagated to every page that used it. A file list showing what had changed since the last sync. One button to put it live.

If you squint, that is a static site generator plus a deploy step, running inside a GUI, in 2006. It solved real problems and I was faster with it than without it.

What it cost

The state lived in the tool. Not in a repository, not in a file I could read: in a proprietary sync database that only one program understood, on one machine. There was no history, so there was no undo beyond what the editor remembered, and no way for a second person to work on the same site without breaking the first person's picture of it.

I lost work that year. Not dramatically, just the ordinary way: overwriting a file on the server that had a fix in it I had made directly on the server three weeks earlier and forgotten about. That is a class of accident that version control makes impossible and that no amount of care prevents.

I am still not using version control, and writing this paragraph is what makes that indefensible. Every argument for it is already true of how I work today. I just have not done it.

The toolchain was a purchase

Worth remembering how differently you acquired tools then. My working setup was one boxed suite, Macromedia Studio 8: Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8 and Flash 8, bought together and installed from a file. That single purchase covered nearly everything I did.

Everything else was also bought, one at a time, and often per site:

A WYSIWYG editor for my own CMS. I did not write the rich-text field, I dropped in SPAW Editor. It is the ancestor of every editor component since, and it came as a zip you unpacked into your project. There was no dependency manager, so upgrading meant unpacking a newer zip over the old one and hoping you had not customised anything.

A video player, licensed per domain. Video in 2006 meant encoding the file with a separate encoder, then embedding JW Player to play it, and my commercial FLV licence for that player was tied to one domain. A second client site meant a second licence.

That is the detail that makes the era concrete. Today I add a <video> element and it works. Then it was an encoder, a player, a licence per domain, and a fallback for anyone without the plugin.

I paid for smaller things too: a favicon editor, a PDF generator, a jQuery layout plugin with a commercial developer licence. Every one of those is now either a browser feature, a free package, or three lines of CSS.

CSS layout, tentatively

The other change: the first sites where the columns are CSS floats rather than table cells. Which meant learning that a floated element does not contribute to its parent's height, and the family of tricks people used before overflow: hidden and long before flexbox.

It was more fragile than the table version. I did it anyway, because a stylesheet change could restyle a whole site and a table change could not.

In short

Every site built inside one editor, on a boxed toolchain, with licensed components bought per site. First layouts done in CSS floats instead of tables.