Dreamweaver on a 550mhz? Or continue hand coding?

Move from hand coding to DW?

[EdAROC]

I have been working on my website and our church's for a few years now - handcoding with NoteTab Pro - and am considering getting DW. Figure it will save time (in exchange for "less than clean code"). This year, one of my objectives has been to migrate towards using css more, you know html for content and css for layout.

Browsed messages here and noticed a few arguments, er, discussions about WYSIWYG vs hand coding. Can appreciate the trade offs. Having learned programming in the 70's my mind is conditioned about clean code. Well, enough about me.

First question - Requirements for DW specify 600 mhz, I have a 550 with 384 mb RAM. (And, anticipating the question - I do NOT like to wait for slow performance).

Maybe this should be the first question - Stick with hand coding or get DW (tool) to save time? How much time will be saved? A lot? About 50%? Depends on how anal I am when I'm coding (yep, that's me). What are your thoughts on the pros and cons?

TIA

[The Contractor]

Are you looking for a WYSIWYG to save time in laying out pages etc? There are plently of WYSIWYG editors out there besides DW with a lot less learning curve. I actually use a product called Namo. Does everything I need it to do. I actually prefer ver 5.5 over the newer version, but I have both installed. It's a fraction of the price of DW. I build all my CSS by hand which isn't hard to do for 99.99% of sites.

edited:
BTW most WYSIWYG will not trash up your code unless you use a lot of the so called "features" of the particular editor. You can create clean W3C compliant code with DW, FrontPage, GoLive, Namo, or almost any other WYSIWYG editor as long as you know what "features" not to use.

[edited by: The_Contractor at 4:08 pm (utc) on July 31, 2005]

[vincevincevince]

For windows, buy EditPlus 2, it's very reasonably priced, and use that for hand coding. It's got some really nice syntax highlighting for HTML.

For linux use Kate (comes with KDE Base) - at least as good as EditPlus 2.

If you know how to use copy and paste, simple string manipulation etc., and know XHTML and CSS well you'll never need to use WYSIWYG and you won't be slowed because of it.

[EdAROC]

Thanks for the info. I will check-out these two and browse through other messages and glean what people have to say about others.