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I Started off designing pages in notepad but soon discovered Frontapge which made table layout Sooo much easier. However Frontpage is Pants and i soon discovered the joys of Dreamweaver. Im design in dreamweaver but constantly view the source to tweak the pages etc
Anyway I seem to get the feeling that some people look down their noses at apps like Dreamweaver. Do hard coders pride themselves on their ability to 'hand code' and think that us WYSIWYG type people are big babies who cant handle the raw web?? or perhaps im being paranoid? Is everyone aware of how much hassle apps like DW can save?
Answers on a postcard to....
Hand coding gives you great control over your pages. Some people use hand coding, others use WYSIWYG's. I think the trick is to be able to hand code because in my experience you will almost always have to go back in and fix something by hand coding eventually, even if you are using a WYSIWYG.
I prefer hand coding, have used Homesite as well. Our Web group hand codes in notepad. Some WYSIWYG's add excess tags in the code, this can add to the size of your page or cause problems when trying to edit.
As long as you are comfortable with your editing tool and know it well enough to tweak your code as needed you should be fine.
Is everyone aware of how much K handcoding can save?
Make changes to the code and see what each browser does. Use percentages and hard values. Change <TD> widths, table widths, colspans, rowspans, etc. Insert graphics, form elements and text. After a while, you will get the feel for how things are -- and that understanding is invaluable.
WYSIWYG editors can never replace this kind of understanding, and all it takes is a few hours of play. After a while the "mystery" of tables begins to vanish.
Yes, there is definitely a 'look down the nose' attitude in a lot of places about WYSIWYG editors. For me, when I factor in time spent, end result, and any necessary custom tweaking, using a combo of a good WYSIWYG and text editor is the best solution.
Javascript (IMO) should be done by hand... HTML can go either way. (As long as you're not using FrontPage... Gawd, that's the ugliest HTML I've EVER seen!)
Have you ever tried the HTML conversions in MS Word and PowerPoint? Just say NO!
And when they come back and want to know Why doesn't my site come up in the search engines?? -you can say:
I tried an HTML conversion in PageMaker a few years ago... I didn't even know what bad code was at the time, but I could tell something wasn't right.
>Why doesn't my site come up in the search engines??
Gawd... in the first month after my employer's site went live, that's ALL I heard from co-workers. I can't count how many times I had to explain the "time to listing/adjusting for ranking" thing.
Like all the SEs are going to say, "OMG!! A brand-new site from some small Alaskan company!! Quick, put that at the top of everything RIGHT AWAY!! Make sure you don't miss a SINGLE possible keyword search!!"
For me, the web is just a transition from PageMaker. I signed up so early that Aldus had to call me up and change my customer number because it wasn't in the same format as their standard and wouldn't work in their database. We finally migrated away from it after PM4, but I bought the upgrade to PM6 anyway --just in case.
Web design is definitely an extension of print layout for me. Probably explains why I prefer WYSIWYG for basic layout. (I was just looking into GoLive's support for CSS also... seems very strong, and handled in such a way that converting our existing site wouldn't be so hard. *whew*)
What I found so attractive about the web was the potential for dynamic content. Which is why I'm SO darned frustrated with the patchy support for DHTML and other nifty-cool visual techniques.
Same with us. We strated with nottab, graduated to HotDog when it was the best WYSIWIG editor in a small field, and reverted back to text editing via Note Tab Pro.
Tried Dremweaver too, it is the best of the WYSIWIG lot, but again came back ti the simple text editor with enhancements like NTP.
You may find i think that people like us who started maybe 10 years ago just find it too hard to change!..its a silver hair thing I think,,, not that we look down our noses.
Give an experienced carpenter a chisel and hammer and he can knock out a pretty wicked looking chair. Give an inexperienced carpenter all the latest gadjets gizmos and power tools and he'll produce a bag of crap.
Yes its important to understand what the app is doing to the code which you can sort out yourself later but WYSIWYG can get you there so much faster! Personally I churn it out in DW then weed through the code by hand.
DW (no i dont work for them) has some really cool features like building tables from imported data, creating stylesheets with ease, performing complex find and replaces, and much much more.
OK im getting off my soapbox now - just thought id put in my 2 cents worth.
They both generate comprehensible code, and allow you to edit the code directly. Whichever you're more comfortable with... go with it. And hey, if you're a serious code beek who's most comfortable with NotePad/BBEdit and a browser for previews... more power to you (weirdos!).
This way I can create complex designs with clean code then utilize a WYSIWYG program to boast my productivity.
Also I will do most of my edits in GoLive.
Hand coding can reduce file sizes and also you can, if you are a wierdo, construct the page in a way that bring your text to the top of the document even though you have a menu bars etc before the text.
And my God! Javascript should NEVER be added using a WYSIWYG application. The Javascript calories and fat these WYSIWYG applications add to your html can cause you a heart attack ack ack ack!
minnapple
Being able to write good HTML code matters a lot. After you can do that, I'd say minapple has the right idea.
This strikes me a something that could work out well and create clean HTML. Is anyone using a visual editor to write CSS coded pages?
Which version of Frontpage???
The only downer is that CSS doesnt work too well with Crapscape I mean Netscape ;)
<raising hand> Me. I use HoTMetaL Pro, which offers a choice between WYSIWYG, HTML and TAGS view, the last one being a semi wysiwyg view with named arrows indicating the type and location of the tags. Very practical - insert cursor next to tag, and press F6 to view and edit attributes. It has a built in CSS editor and writes very clean code.
Having said that, you should know that this is the orthodox fundamentalist of HTML. If you try to open a page written by another program such as Front Page, HoTMetAL will scream bloody murder and force you to clean up everything before it will open the document. That can take anywhere up to an hour and will drive you up the walls, but is really good with pages that it has created from scratch since you can see the main faetures of the coding without actually having to look at the HTML.
>I use Dreamweaver to implement CSS and find it makes using Style Sheets soooo easy - a few clicks and an entire external stylesheet can be created
I wish I could agree with that. I have a h*ll of a time using Dreamweaver in a couple of particular instances.
If you start the site with hand code and then go to Dreamweaver to tweak, Dreamweaver will spit bugs out all over the place. I had a site I did all by hand and then tried to do tweaks/ CSS with Dreamweaver and fought it the entire time. Usually, the code said one thing and the visual did something else. It made me crazy.
If I made the pages from scratch in Dreamweaver, not as much of a problem.
When I tried to make CSS for any of my pages, the styles never worked, or would work sporatically.
I will note that when I learned to use Dreamweaver, I learned on a PC and didn't have any CSS problems at all.
For the most part, though, I am happy with Dreamweaver and the tidyness of the code.
-G
>Which version of Frontpage???
Don't remember. It was a year or so ago, and a woman asked me to add some stuff to and 'clean up' her site... it was done in FrontPage, and 'cleaning up' basically entailed rebuilding all the pages from scratch.
However, as tedster mentioned, the HTML that Power Point spits out is 1,000 times worse than FrontPage.
> Is anyone using a visual editor to write CSS
I'm going to start checking out GoLive's CSS capabilities... the manual makes it sound quite easy, but knowing nothing about CSS, it will take some research to see how 'compliant' the results are.
Top Style is a good dedicated CSS authoring tool. You set the compliance level you want to stick to.... CSS level 1, CSS level 2, Netscape, IE or whatever.
When I have a true SEO site to build I fall back to FirstPage - it just saves having to type all the special characters.
I find DW is really good for doing CSS as I didnt know diddly squat about CSS until DW. Now i cant imagine not using it.
I havent hand coded an entire site since university so i cant comment on what its like to then transfer over to DW but i find even when i create stuff outside of dreamweaver I can carry on the work with DW and it doesnt change the code.
