It Won't Always Be Like This

"It won't always be like it is, now". That's what a teacher once told me was the First Rule of Money. He said you could apply this to any area of study with a dollar sign in front of it. Business, finance, economics, investing. It didn't matter. The first thing you have to know is that it won't always be like it is, now.

This was some comfort to me, because things at the time were pretty awful. Unemployment was up. Inflation was up. The general mood in the country was bad for the first time in many peoples' lives. Kids born in the early '50s grew up in a world where things got better every year and people just accepted that the American Way was the best. But nothing lasts forever.

If you still handle your money today the way it was popular in 1974 or 1982 you don't have much money left. Back then, interest rates were high and you could lock-in a great return, risk-free, by buying a CD. Stocks? They were cheap for a reason, though nobody could agree on what the reason was. And then one day in 1982 The Market took off. And nobody saw it coming, and nobody could agree on why, but nobody wanted to miss out on it, either. The same thing happened with real estate.

Political polling is slipping because they depend almost entirely upon land-line telephones. This was fine for a hundred years, but today a lot of households have cell phones only. Today there are noticeably fewer young people and low-income people around to pick up a wired phone and answer questions. This tends to overstate some advantages and understate others.

So here we are, building Web pages, with HTML. For a while, they told us we were using the last version of HTML we would ever have to learn. We could learn it all, at last. Once you figured out the nuances of the data definition tag, you were done and could go out and play. And build Web pages. And so we did.

Cascading Style Sheets came along, got better for a while and then stalled, similar to the path HTML had been on. So "this" was how HTML worked, and "that" is how CSS worked. Kewl. We got down to having only to learn the subtle differences between releases of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver MX 2004 to Dreamweaver 8? Take a week or so and you'll be golden. Creative Suite 3? Sure! Creative Suite 4? You bet!

After a while it starts to look like these are the tools you're going to use for the rest of your career. People ask "Should I upgrade?" They never seem to ask "Should I buy Dreamweaver at all?" Maybe it's time to start asking.

Look, this is a priesthood that not everyone is interested in joining. And in truth, not everyone needs this much horsepower, anyway. You could run a small or even a medium-sized business quite easily with Dreamweaver. But if your needs are simple you don't require the kinds of features and benefits Dreamweaver is packed with. You don't need the support for various scripting interfaces, you don't need the programmy features. What you need is about where Dreamweaver was at Version 5ive! But all of those Dreamweaver developers still have jobs and the odds are good we will one day have shelves full of Dreamweaver CS9.

Is this a Good Idea? Is it necessary? In these troubled economic times (drink), should we just blindly upgrade every several months or could that money be better used in some other way, like getting you an extra cable channel or two, or maybe putting you into the V6 model, instead of the four-cylinder?

Computers were supposed to make our lives easier. We were supposed to be better off, for having them and mastering them. Can't we use some of their horsepower and intelligence and apply it to the task of building Web pages?

Well, yeah. As it turns out, we can. And it may signal the end of the need for Dreamweaver, for most people. There will still be some folks who have to have the kinds of gee-whiz features that are part of the baked-in goodness in every box. And they will still need training (I hope) in HTML and CSS and Dreamweaver, itself.

But there may be a tool that will be Good Enough for most others. A tool that's free, except for the frictional expense of training.