Interview with Susan Morrow
Susan Morrow is Macromedia's Senior Director of Product Management, best known amongst Dreamweaver users as the person with the vision and leader of the development team for the DW4 to Dreamweaver MX upgrade.
We caught up with her during the very busy launch week for the MX 2004 family of products for an exclusive interview with DMXzone.com.
Can we see the manifesto please?
I think Bob was probably referring to the first public company policy on accessibility, which still survives in a better-written form on macromedia.com.
Why did Dreamweaver get this huge community behind it, while FrontPage and Adobe GoLive never really got the customers so passionately behind it?
Dreamweaver was and remains unique in its focus on customers and the challenges they face with web development. Early on, Dreamweaver distinguished itself with round-trip HTML, which had the very simple, very clear commitment to not mess with people's code. And that was not so much about any particular bell or whistle as it was about understanding how important it is that a tool is trustworthy. Customers guide us not just with feature ideas, but with basic philosophies of development: don't mess with my code, support standards, work with the technologies I use (instead of the ones you want to sell me), etc. And while we're not perfect, we try hard to follow those requirements.
Some DMXzone customers have complained that now Matt Brown (ex-Dreamweaver Community Manager) has gone and hasn't been replaced, and Dave Deming (ex product manager for Dreamweaver MX) has gone, they feel that Macromedia is severing its ties with the Dreamweaver-using community. Is that true?
I know there have been a lot of changes to the Dreamweaver team that impact the community, particularly people who have invested in developing extensions for Dreamweaver. I miss both Matt and Dave, and I can understand why others do too. But what hasn't changed at all is that there are still a lot of very dedicated folks on the Dreamweaver team. And we all still obsess about getting the product right for our customers, even when we're not all on the forums or active on community lists.
The change from Dreamweaver 4 to MX was massive - the amalgamation of all the UltraDev features, XHTML, Accessibility etc all rolled in. What drove the change?
Um.. sheer madness? At least, that's what I think it must have been when I look back! Everything we delivered in MX was the result of customer requests - it was great to be able to do so much in a single release, even if it did nearly kill us to get it out the door!
What can we expect in the next version of Dreamweaver?
Luckily, I'm late enough in responding to you, Bruce, that you can now just check it all out on www.macromedia.com/dreamweaver!
What's your take on the growing acceptance of Web Standards etc in the wider community?
It's great to see the hard work of standards leaders finally take hold - I think we're just at the beginning of realizing the vision of a well-structured, efficiently built web. We're hopeful about Dreamweaver's contribution to this, and it'll be fun to keep working on this in future releases.
Is the cause of web standards etc enhanced or knocked back by news of Netscape's death and the death of IE as a standalone browser?
The growth and importance of community and industry driven standards is independent of any browser.
The emphasis at Macromedia seems to have shifted from "what the web can be" to "experience matters". Why? Does this signify a shift from driving change to beautifying the status-quo?
I think the shift in taglines is really more about saying that it's not enough to simply build the biggest and most ambitious project - the focus needs to remain on how good the experience is for users of the site and/or application.
Is Macromedia trying to have Flash replace the browser?
Hmm, if we were, that would really suck for Dreamweaver, the largest revenue stream in the company, now wouldn't it? When you said that, a picture came to mind of a loaded gun and a bare foot! Seriously, we anticipate coexistence of the browser and the player for quite a long while.
What's the 'next big thing'? Rich Internet Applications replacing html except for text-driven sites?
I think that HTML-based web apps and sites have a very long shelf-life. Flash applications provide some tremendous advantages, and it's going to be a lot of fun to see how this new version of Flash Professional knocks down barriers for building rich internet applications. There's certainly a lot of room to improve the user experience for web applications and the Flash team has some excellent ideas, but there should also be some improvements to HTML-based web apps as well. I'm interested in seeing how XML and XSL will continue to transform web development, particularly given the XML focus of the newest version of Office.
When will Dreamweaver be able to spell check alt text? Did Macromedia not take into account Nested layers when developing Dreamweaver MX? It's well known they stack up on top of each another, regardless of their relationship, in the Design view. Can we look forward to better WYSIWYG editing of CSS in future editions?
You have good timing! We're discussing the possibility of these two along with many other exciting ideas for improving our CSS support in our planning sessions that are happening right now!
Thanks Susan!
Bruce Lawson
I'm the brand manager of glasshaus, a publishing company specialising in books for web professionals. We've a series for dreamweaver professionals - the dreamweaver pro series.
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