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Then I come here and see all the problems everyone is having. hahah.
Anyways,
Are there people out there that still primarily create and manage with text editors?
Matt
Then I come here and see all the problems everyone is having. hahah.
I use FrontPage 2003, and I'm not aware of any problems that "everyone" is having.
As someone who wrote HTML code out of necessity in the mid-1990s, I do know that hand-editing HTML is hard on the eyes and not very rewarding to anyone who isn't (a) a hobbyist or (b) paid by the hour to write code.
To each his own, but I prefer to spend my time creating editorial content and letting a program do the boring drudge work.
Are there people out there that still primarily create and manage with text editors?
Stage I: Do everything in HTML with a text editor. Good place to learn what your needs are. Good place to learn how much suffering and pain goes with manually coding everything in HTML. Good place to learn how painful XSLT is to learn/use.
Stage II: Do everything in XML, using XSLT and a few templates to produce the HTML. Good place to learn the joy of separating content from presentation. Retain complete control over HTML, but automatically ensure HTML is 100% bug-free, and be able to change entire look of website by changing a single template. Also learn that this method only scales to about a few hundred pages before getting irritating, due to speed.
Stage III: Create tool to solve the scaling problem (so it scales to thousands, not hundreds of pages), automate various other tasks, and generally make life lovely.
I'm in stage III. The main scaling problem is simply the time cost of rebuilding an entire website every time you make a change. An automated tool solves this by analyzing dependency information and only rebuilding (running the appropriate XSLT transformations on) the minimal number of files required after you make some changes. Of course, the tool needs to also make it easy to only upload the changed set of output files. And, while you're at it, you might as well offer some handy UI features like offering an outbound link browser, managing AdSense channel code generation, automatic generation of <img> tag width/height, automatic generation of throw-away "cache forever" URLs for graphics/CSS/JavaScript files, etc.
The pain of stage III is watching other work grind to a halt while you get obsessed with tool building :-)
The larger the site the more you need to use tools to do batch updates or even generate pages/sites.
As for which editors, I use Notepad++ or SciTE for the most part, both of which use the Scintilla editing component internally and are open source. They support editing of everything from C/C++ and Java to ASP, PHP, CSS, HTML and Javascript. I even put together a portable version of SciTE so I could use it when I'm on another PC.
I hand code templates for use with Drupal for running some of my clients sites and my own big websites (7 million page views a month).
What, you handcode templates? Real men code every page by hand. :-)
What, you handcode templates? Real men code every page by hand. :-)
Yeah, somehow manually coding all the forum posts and user-edited pages seemed a bit much :-) (2150 pages on the site and counting)
why would you want to carve a tree with a flint when you can use a proper chisel ..
I like to use SuperEdi when not in Dreamweaver, colours my code in lovely :-P
why would you want to carve a tree with a flint when you can use a proper chisel ..
Or, better yet, a power tool.
