Why is Dreamweaver's design view so messed up?

Question

Hi
I am sure this has been asked and answered loads of times but here goes again.
Dreamweaver gets a lot of bad press because of it's design view but why does Dreamweavers Design view render web pages so badly? Even pages that validate and are well structured often render very poorly. Why is this?
It's not as if DW doesn't have a decent rendering engine built in - live view works perfectly well. And Contribute seems to be able to present an editable page rendered correctly.
The design view obviously has some sort of rendering engine to do it's job but is it a bespoke, poorly written one that it's not up to the job? Why keep it if doesn't work? Is there just no will to fix it?

Answer 1

I don't like vendor prefexes. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I like less code.
An example:
body {
          font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
          font-size: 100%;
          color: #000000;
          background-color: #fff;
          margin: 0;
          padding: 0;
          background: #402a67; /* Old browsers */
          background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #402a67 0%, #ffffff 70%) fixed no-repeat; /* FF3.6+ */
          background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#402a67), color-stop(70%,#ffffff)) fixed; /* Chrome,Safari4+ */
          background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #402a67 0%,#ffffff 70%) fixed; /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */
          background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #402a67 0%,#ffffff 70%) fixed; /* Opera11.10+ */
          background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #402a67 0%,#ffffff 70%) fixed; /* IE10+ */
          filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#402a67', endColorstr='#ffffff',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
          background: linear-gradient(top, #402a67 0%,#ffffff 70%) fixed; /* W3C */
Now, if everyone would agree on a standard, the graduated background would be described thusly:
body {
          font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
          font-size: 100%;
          color: #000000;
          background-color: #fff;
          margin: 0;
          padding: 0;
  background: #402a67; /* Old browsers if needed at all */
  background: linear-gradient(top, #402a67 0%,#ffffff 70%) fixed; /* W3C */
That's 8 lines of code instead of 13.
One might ask how much longer it takes a browser to load that much extra code that is specific to other browsers and not the one one is actually using.
Dreamweaver does display the background correctly here, but only in Live View. And, with some of the colors, I find it nearly impossible to see some of the type.