GoLive Goes Dead as Adobe Consolidates

There's only room for one Web authoring tool in Adobe's house, and Dreamweaver wins.

As of today,Adobe will no longer develop or support GoLive,the Web authoring tool it originally created to compete with MacromediaDreamweaver. Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, and obviously it doesn't make much sense to compete with oneself. Really it was only a matter of time.

But I always had a soft spot for GoLive. Dreamweaver is great, but for whatever reason I always liked GoLive's UI a little better, even if the code it generated was sometimes quirky. Besides, market competition is always a good thing. Where now can we find a competitor to Adobe Dreamweaver?

GoLive isn't the first application to get the axe in the wake of the Macromedia acquisition. Adobe Illustrator finally bested longtime competitor Freehand last year, while Adobe ImageReady bowed out in favor of Macromedia-developed Fireworks.

Web authoring seems like a different matter, however. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Web graphics formats are all public, open standards. It just doesn't seem right that the primary tool for professional Web site creation should be an expensive, proprietary software package. Where are the low-cost or open source competitors?

A Google search for "Dreamweaver competitor"yields few results. Microsoft offersVisual Web Developer 2008for free, but its focus on ASP .Net, combined with Internet Explorer's poor support for Web standards, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. A product calledAptana Studiomight be a good solution for some, but it's less user-friendly than Dreamweaver and it requires the Java Runtime Environment to work.

I'm all for pulling out my text editor to tweak HTML pages when that gets the job done, but sometimes you want a tool with a little more sophistication. What do you use to develop your Web sites? Leave suggestions -- and any eulogies for Adobe GoLive -- in the PC World Community Comments.