Sorry, but I totally disagree.

The vast majority of professional Web Developers wouldn't dream of using Dreamweaver (if you excuse the pun). Dreamweaver's code view generates the XHTML / CSS code for you, and this results in code that is at best adequate and at worst bloated and over-complicated.

There is no substitute for having a solid understanding of standards-compliant XHTML / CSS and writing the code by hand, using which ever text editor you feel comfortable with, whether this is Dreamweaver's own code view or something else.

Adamv - I totally agree with you. Most professional web developers wouldnt use Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is like a toy tool - it's useful for starting out into web development - new developers might find the layout view intuitive. And even the drag-and-drop widgets/controls for hooking up to a database might be useful for basic tasks... But once you need to do something that's not out-of-the-box catered for by Dreamweaver, then you've got to hack the code anyway, or spend a lot of time figuring out how to make dreamweaver do what you want. And if you're going to do that, why not just do it by hand in the first place where you will have complete control over all the code, and you won't have to deal with bloat.

On the plus side, though, the FTP client in Dreamweaver which mirrors local and remote copies of a site's files is quite cool. Certainly handier than using Filezilla for uploading changed files to server.

Nonsense and simply not true. Makes one wonder if you've ever even seen or used DW. I coded w/ a text editor for years--switched to DW a decade ago and never looked back. Just try doing something like making site-wide edits w/ a text editor. Any competent DW coder will leave one working with a text editor in the dust...

If you combine solid coding skills and practices with Dreamweaver's power tools you have the best possible development platform. All of the sites at www.sthwind.com/portfolio were made with Dreamweaver, (mostly in code view), none can be descibed as bloated.

I speak from experience using Dreamweaver - I started out using it and thought it was great - WOW, I though, I can drag-and-drop a database result set into a datagrid on a webpage. I was impressed. But to be honest, that kind of thing isn't really that hard to code by hand anyway, and once you need to do something that isn't pre-rolled for you by Dreamweaver, then you've got to do a lot of coding and fiddling about anyway...

This said, I am not suggesting replacing Dreamweaver with a plain text editor, but with one of the other tools out there, like Eclipse. For me, using Eclipse, with PHP plugin which allows you to step-through PHP code leaves Dreamweaver in the dust.

And again, while I'm not syaing a text-editor is better than DW, there are plenty of text editors that will do refactoring and site-wide edits

I find Vim is more than enough for me :)
Eclipse is another very popular dev-app thats used in plenty of companies for both Java and PHP. Zend's IDE is another one.

You can't really compare DW and Eclipse though. I'd class DW as the kind of app you use before you learn how to code properly. Drag & drop interfaces for coding just don't feel right for me - if you can't build the system yourself, then you don't know how it will actually behave when it goes live!

I'm all with using DW and hand coding. That combo has worked for me to easily and "quickly" build sites that validate well. The bottom line is it's kind of funny when you go to some of the "better financed" mobile sites and see how poorly they validate with the mobi.ready checker. Again, using the DW / hand coding combo helps me to build sites that validate with a 5.