vincevincevince - 2:14 am on May 21, 2007 (gmt 0)

I must admit that you are entirely right about dreamweaver. The only mainstream package I'm aware of which is less user-friendly and counter-intuitive is Macromedia Flash.

If you don't know exactly what options should be there then you won't know what you are looking for or be able to guess where you might find it in Dreamweaver. It is very difficult for someone with no experience of HTML or advanced WYSIWYG editors to get to grips with Dreamweaver.

The problem is that modern web designers expect to be able to do everything. If dreamweaver didn't support virtually everything you can possibly handcode in HTML then it would be judged as somewhat deficient. As soon as there are large areas of functionality which dreamweaver doesn't support, it forces hitherto-dreamweaver-dependant developers to learn HTML, provides an opportunity to the competition to get ahead.

I'm not familiar with Coolpage, but from your description I suspect it offers you a tiny subset of HTML, aimed at allowing you to make choices about basic formatting (font, colour, emphasis) and add images, tables and links.

I remember a very early beta of Frontpage which was forced on my college in exchange for free 20Mb webhosting by Microsoft back when it was worth money ("you can only upload pages created with Frontpage"). It too gave very limited functionality.