Ah. I looked at Coda. I think I see the disconnect. If I were using PHP to make web UIs, that would probably be the way I'd go...

Bizarrely, I only do two things with Dreamweaver. One is straight HTML w/ almost no CSS, that's newsletter layouts for one group of clients. For that stuff, the split-screen is a big time saver since a lot of the copy-paste stuff can be done on the wysiwyg side and just cleaned up real quick in the code.

The other thing I use it for is pure back-end stuff in PHP; stuff that never sees the light of an end-user's screen, is purely sorting, game methods and processing against SQL db's with all the in/out done through an AMF gateway to a flash front-end.

Once in awhile I'll have a call to write some Javascript with it, but I'm just as happy writing that with TextEdit... And there are a couple older websites I maintain that do some actual hypertext processing to the frontend, but I don't have the patience to set up a test server, especially with DW, just so I can pass arguments to the pages and see them in my editor; I'm fine with hitting F12 and just reloading them in firefox when I make an edit.

Actually the whole idea of having my FTP program and local server map exist inside my IDE kind of rubs me the wrong way. Just a rambling aside, but when DW was young and I was, too, back in 1998, I worked at a web shop in SF that demanded we run our workflow through DW's site setups (that's how long I've been using the stupid program - 12 years). The thing is, once you've got that set up in DW, it's very easy to get confused and up the wrong version of something to the production server. You're deep in code, suddenly someone says "fix this", next thing you know you just put a broken thing you were working on, right on a live site, and you're scrambling to find the backup copy. It's not for me. Now I do my live PHP edits through nano or pico over ssh; at least it forces me to pay close attention to what I'm doing...