Adobe have announced today that they've released a brand new authoring tool for web designers. Adobe, The market leader in all web design/dev related software? This must be amazing then! After all Adobe's Quality Engineer said the following:
Quality engineer Jason Prozora-Plein says this mostly means avoiding coding in any form. He argues that the overlap between people who are passionate about coding and graphic design is very small and that “people don’t hand-edit Postscript or PDF files for print, and in five or ten years I don’t think very many people will be coding to design websites“.
Jason Prozora-Plein, Adobe
Surely this must mean Adobe Muse is a fantastic new bit of software that should make front-end developers worldwide scared that now the neighbours boy next door really will be able to out price you and create something of equal quality!
WRONG
Cutting straight to the chase, Adobe Muse spits out awful, messy, syntactically invalid and out-dated markup which should make the entire crew involved in creating Adobe Muse ashamed.
This is a massive step in the wrong direction.
It’s a step back towards the days of Microsoft’s Frontpage authoring tool which was the first thing a lot of budding young developers & designers picked up (even myself many years ago).
Given Adobe’s reputation amongst new developers and designers they will automatically assume everything that comes from Adobe is awesome and the right way to do things. They won’t realise the negative effect it will have on their clients, SEO, stunting growth of their own skills and on the community at large that will spend the next 5-10 years cleaning up the mess Adobe Muse will leave in its act of destruction.
Usually I’m quite impartial and can see some good in products, usually I keep my mouth zipped but in this case it can’t go unnoticed. Adobe have created a truly awful piece of software which could potentially damage our industry for years to come.
Code Quality & Accessibility
The Adobe Muse website is created in the new authoring tool. This is a case and point of why you should not use Adobe Muse for anything in the future.
It seemingly generates inline CSS & JavaScript which is not cacheable by the browser, so creates a significant overhead for users and from a server point of view. It also creates a nightmare for anyone to maintain in the future, constantly having to edit multiple flat HTML files to maintain, update and fix the CSS & JavaScript output by Adobe Muse. This is one of the first things you learn not to do when looking at CSS & JavaScript. External files are cacheable and inherently more maintainable than inline content.
It adds needless and bulky classes to elements. Why does a paragraph element need a class of paragraph? Why does a heading 3 element need a class of heading-3. Surely Adobe you’ve heard of simple element based CSS selectors. You just say .somecontainer h3 and it magically targets all heading level 3 elements.
Introducing #AdobeMuse! Create websites as easily as u create layouts for print. Design/publish HTML pages w/o code- bit.ly/MuseWb
Accessibility
Accessibility is an on-going issue which unfortunately doesn’t seem to get enough attention, yet issues affect hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. It’s something we’ll be talking seriously about at Heart & Sole 2 but something Adobe Muse don’t seem to have taken into consideration.
There seems to be no semantic structure to their headings. Elements that you would naturally expect to be headings aren’t, they’re simply paragraphs. Simple lists that should be marked up with <li> <a> are a mess of divs anchors and other elements.
ID’s and Class names have meaningless Adobe Muse friendly values which don’t help anyone trying to maintain this in the future. Any sort of flexibility goes out the window unless you’re using Adobe Muse.
HTML5… apparently!
It includes an HTML5 doctype. Fantastic. Except from what I can find no site uses it. Not one drop of HTML5 makes it into the markup any where.
People need to realise that just because you set an HTML5 doctype doesn’t improve something or make it HTML5. You need to actually use HTML5 markup in order to make it HTML5!! Otherwise It’s XHTML at best.
HTML5 is such an important part of a front-end developers toolkit these days. It’s finally beginning to make a serious impact in sites all over the web! Support is getting better by the day, IE can be fixed with a simple JS Shiv and it lays the foundation for more readable semantic and accessible code for all.
Just stop trying!
Editors that purport to create perfect standards compliant layouts rarely do. Even if the code they spit out is technically/semantically correct it doesn’t mean it’s good.
What I’ve looked at here are just a few examples of how Adobe Muse get seemingly everything drastically wrong. I personally believe that no WYSIWYG editor will ever completely replace (for the better) coding by hand.
Sure, not everyone can create semantically accessible markup but, flipping it around to the other side… I can’t do design. So I leave it up to the people that can!
I can’t do design. So I leave it up to the people that can!
The issue is much more apparent from the other side because 99% of people can all quickly recognise bad design with a quick look at a site or design. Bad markup is not so easy to spot but it seems Adobe think it’s of lesser value and not important as long as it’s “creative” and looks right!
That’s my two pence
Some of you may disagree with my blatant and utter dislike for Adobe Muse. Everything has it’s lovers and it’s haters. My passion and love for this industry sometimes comes out in rant form but I believe in this case it’s incredibly valid!
If you disagree, leave me a comment.
If you agree please send out a tweet and help destroy this monster!
Comments
Comments are now closed on this article.
@jegtnes
15.08.2011
I completely and wholeheartedly agree. The web has made such a huge leap from the unsemantic cluttered table layouts of yore – but the output spewed out by Adobe’s latest plaything is absolutely cringeworthy. The software itself is quite interesting to use – it seems like a good way for a complete beginner to lay out a page, but the actual mark-up being output from Muse takes the piss, to put it bluntly. A huge proverbial kick in the teeth.
Robin
15.08.2011
I do agree with you for the most part, but your section on HTML5 is wrong. It’s HTML5 if it validates according to an HTML5 validator; no more, no less. You could build your entire markup structure using divs and it’d be valid albeit unsemantic HTML5. Of course you wouldn’t want to but the lack of an article element does not invalid HTML5 make. See also: implicit sectioning.
Author
Tom Kentell
15.08.2011
@Robin totally agree :) but it just annoys me that they stick in an HTML5 doctype and don’t bother to use more semantic HTML5 elements to mark up various bits of the page.
It seems a stupid mistake to make given that they are releasing it in a time where HTML5 is becoming more and more popular and support is growing constantly.
I can’t see why they haven’t used HTML5? It will just hinder it’s adoption.
Robin
15.08.2011
They haven’t used HTML5 semantic elements because not using HTML5 semantic elements is Muse’s raison d’être. It hides all the semantics from the user and presents the site to the Muse user as effectively a drawing field which, from the point of purported userbase, is what’s necessary.
#hasteam
Alex Stanhope
15.08.2011
To my mind, a snazzy Doctype alone does not HTML5 make in many ways. Like many of us, I’ve come across loads of sites lately that use the relevant Doctype, but don’t actually feature any of the new elements that have been introduced. Personally, while I totally concur that this isn’t invalid in the overall scheme of things, I don’t see the point of bothering if that’s going to be the approach!
On the subject of making it “easy” for designers to generate sites at the push of a button, this has been a recurring theme almost as long as graphical browsing has been around. A decade or so ago, there were “extensions” for Quark Xpress (the then ruler of the DTP roost) which allowed for this very thing (the Beyond Press offering from Extensis springs to mind immediately here). The code output was horrific to say the least, and ten years on, it looks like things aren’t much improved. We’ve also had software like the Sitegrinder plug-in for Photoshop, and again, this isn’t much cop either.
I guess where I’m going with this is that a machine can generate HTML/CSS that “works”, but the real devil is always in the detail. Those with time on their hands can pick up markup and styling relatively quickly – but, the real learning curve lies in the (many) nuances; accessibility, cross-browser, mobile support – there’s a lot to wrap your head around if you’re just beginning to get into hand coding.
Based on this, I’d always suggest that people should play to their strengths – it’s the only sane way in business (and life in general); if you’re a solo designer and haven’t got either the time or the inclination to learn about this stuff, my recommendation would be to pass the work on to someone who has already put the hours in when it comes to front-ending!
Chris Wharton
15.08.2011
Whether or not HTML5 is valid with or without HTML5 markup like section, article, aside etc. is not the point. HTML5 has been created as a specification to use those semantic elements and Adobe are being both irresponsible and inconsistent. They cannot release Adobe CS5.5 with built in HTML5 support for Dreamweaver one week and Adobe Muse with just the HTML5 doctype the next. We’re supposed to be working together to make HTML5 work in a consistent and semantically correct manner. Google understands, Mozilla understands, Apple understands, Opera understands, hell…. even Microsoft understands, why doesn’t Adobe?
Author
Tom Kentell
15.08.2011
Nice points :) All the other big wigs understand, why can’t Adobe?
Dan Edwards
16.08.2011
Great article Tom, it is such a shame companies like Adobe are producing software like this, it really devalues our industry and some of the comments from Jason Prozora-Plein are just outright idiotic! I have not tried this software and do not plan on been giving it the time of day, I have seen the code it spits out and I’ve seen toddlers produce better cr*p!
Thanks for taking the time to write such an in-depth article with some great points!
Author
Tom Kentell
16.08.2011
Thank ya kindly sir :) It is a massive shame but let us hope beyond all hope that all this bad press forces their hand one way or another!
Keith Cirkel
16.08.2011
I don’t understand why there is so much hatred for this app, to be honest. It is very obviously not a tool for creating production websites, and I don’t think Adobe will ever market it as such. To me this seems to be a good tool for rapid prototyping, (perhaps the problem right now is that it seems to be loosely marketing as a website authoring tool, rather than a rapid prototyping tool). If an IA or Designer can spend 20 minutes to get a functional prototype to demonstrate to clients, as opposed to getting us to spend a few hours crafting a semantic website for the client to say they want everything different; for which surely this is a worthwhile app.
Author
Tom Kentell
16.08.2011
There’s hatred because it’s basically another Frontpage. Frontpage produced bad markup, so does Muse. It’s never going to have a positive effect on the industry. Sure if people want to do rapid prototyping that’s fine. But many people will not stop there.
Using Muse to create production websites of any size is bad news, see all my points in the article. No good can come of it.
Sure it’s easy to use for people that don’t know what their doing. But as I said I could make something in Photoshop, it ain’t gonna be pretty but it’ll work. Just working isn’t good enough. It needs to excel, be optimised from an SEO point of view and for screen readers.
Anyone that believes Adobe Muse is a good piece of software that produces good markup (in it’s current state) is kidding themselves.
Author
Tom Kentell
16.08.2011
Also… although unconfirmed at this time I’ve heard people saying there’s no code view at all? Why would you do that? Then people can’t learn from anything (not that I would recommend learning from the markup that Muse spits out)
Lilian
17.08.2011
I keep trying to find an HTML only view, but am failing to do so. You can insert HTML arbitrarily, but I literally have no idea where it sits.
Ultimately, I feel this is no different from what happens with any other craft. Technology is an enabler, but it cannot decide taste or quality. There will always be masters, and there will always be cowboys. As professionals, we have to ensure that the sustainability & quality of our work is recognised over that of the machine or amateurs. It also helps to be vocal and educate others, which the web community has never had a problem doing :)
That said, Adobe Muse is trite and I don’t even consider myself a developer by trade. What do you mean you need to include 6 different JS files to make a simple accordion? ffff
Chris Wharton
17.08.2011
The problem is, Keith, it is isn’t clear that this tool is for rapid prototyping. The main Muse site is created with Muse and their examples are public facing websites, not prototypes. Yes, it could be good for rapid prototyping but surely that would limit Adobe’s market. Why make a prototyping tool when you can sell to the mass market as a website creation tool on a subscription basis?
Shane Hudson
17.08.2011
To be honest, the best way to sum up the general opinion of Adobe Muse is by saying that at last night’s #pfmeet, when one person mentioned the word “muse” everybody would laugh!
Harry Walter
17.08.2011
I have to say I was interested at first, but looking deeper was dissapointed by the mess it created. Just have a look at the muse site itself to see the issues. Combining this with Adobes other recent releases I think they are in danger of doing more harm than advancing the web. For example I know a member of my family has decided to do his own website using a web authoring tool called serif. He has decided to learn more and so now looking at the source code, like Muse serif produces horrendous and often just wrong markup and so not setting a good example or starting point for those wanting to progress from drag and drop authoring to full fledged html build.
#hasteam
Alex Stanhope
17.08.2011
Seriously, have you seen the markup on the Muse site itself? If this is an advertisement for the "power" of the application, then I think I’ll pass, thank you very much. It seems to spit out code so bloated that not even Dreamweaver or a whole host of old skool WYSIWYG tools could match. This really does feel like a retrograde step to my mind :(
Comments are now closed on this article.