That was my point. If you're familiar enough with HTML to use Arachnophilia (which, if anyone isn't familiar with that particular editor, was basically just the Notepad++ of it's day) then Dreamweaver would just seem excessive. Hence why I'd recommend it for designers rather than developers ;)
> as Dreamweaver produced very clean HTML output.
Cleaner than Frontpage and most of the other design tools out then, sure. But my experience of Dreamweaver around that era was that it's HTML output still needed a lot of manual refactoring in a text editor afterwards. While it was better than most GUIs it was still a long way off "very clean HTML output".
I'm sure things have improved significantly in the last 15/20 years though. But that was certainly the state of things back in the late 90s / early 00s.
As an aside note: I won a Source Code Planet (anyone remember them?) competition one month with an entry I made in Dreamweaver. It was a mockup of a Window 95 or 98 (I forget which) desktop with functioning start menu. I always felt naughty for winning based on something I built in a tool that auto-generates a lot of the code for you but then other projects I released were a lot more credible (eg DirectX games) but far less popular. I guess it just goes to show how little most people cared for code quality even back then.
I remember Planet Source Code, it was the Github of the late 1990s. Everything from VB, C++ and HTML samples were there. A one stop community platform. I remember I coded a Windows 98 shell replacement, a Frontpage WYSIWYG clone, an Paint clone, DirectX8 games in VB6. Then MSFT canceled VB7, me people moved elsewhere. Then Sourceforge took over. And later Google Code took over. Then Github took over.
Mostly because of cargo cult -- as Dreamweaver produced very clean HTML output.