Ask HN: what still sucks about web development?

Anything from framework features, editors, technologies, hosting, deployment, standards, conventions, whatever. What are the biggest obstacles preventing you from easily writing modern web applications? And if you have and ideas on how to fix it, I'd be interested in that as well.

I'm less interested in non-technical issues (dealing with clients, etc.)

Are these bugs fairly common? Is there no way of writing an IE "spell checker" - meaning that you throw code at it and it makes it IE compatible?

Aside from IE like someone mentioned I would have to say DreamWeaver (answering the question in the title not the one you posted in your post)

I have this job for the summer recoding sites that were built using DreamWeaver. They took Photoshop files, sliced large chunks of it and used DreamWeaver to make it a "website" if you can call it that. It's all a horrible mess.

Even after learning how to properly deploy rails apps in production, it still sucks. I want to be able to install the heroku deployment process on my own servers.

I'm pretty sure your question is squarely aimed at experienced developers, but I would like to offer a perspective from someone coming into web development from a completely different industry (film editing).

I decided to abandon my career as a film editor because I found my interests and ambitions leaning more toward interactive media and web development.

Having left editing at a time when video standards were all over the board (it wasn't uncommon to receive projects shot over 10 different formats), it wasn't all that surprising to see that web development is in a similar state of frenzy.

The sheer number of languages/frameworks/libraries/etc… is enough to make a person's head spin off. Honestly, being quite new, I don't fully understand how you experienced guys keep up. My own personal solution was to just choose a language (semi-arbitrarily) and dig in.

So my point in all this, from a purely newbie standpoint is that MY biggest frustration so far has been the sheer number of technologies to choose from.

I'm definitely not lost on the idea that this is a positive thing from the standpoint of innovation. Like most other industries, the REALLY good ideas tend to float to the top. But you asked for frustrating things, and navigating through all the different options has been MY most daunting challenge thus far from a technical standpoint.