durbs said:
Lol, no you shouldnt at all. Believe me. Been a professional developer all my career started of on web design and still do a lot of that sort of work. You use notepad to tweak existing code but the thought of coding a site from scrtach in notepad is laughable. Possible totally, but so is walking from lands end to John o Groats but its a lot faster by car!
For HTML stuff, Dreamweaver is unbeatable
A "professional developer" with experience in web design who describes the concept of hard coding a website "laughable?" I must say thats a first for me.
If you're a complete novice who just wants to throw together a quick site for your local cricket club, go ahead and use a WYSIWYG application. The code produced will be horrible, bloated and about as semantic as a chocolate teapot. Of course, chances are your visitors aren't going to care, and neither will you.
If you intend on creating a proper website, on the other hand, or would like to get into web design as a career, forget WYSIWYG. I find it absolutely shocking that someone who claims to have been involved in web design compares the use of WYSIWYG applications as opposed to hand coding as driving a car as opposed to walking "from lands end to John o Groats." I know, with the knowledge under my belt, that I would run a mile if I saw a "professional" web design company using WYSIWYG applications. Scratch that, I probably wouldn't make it past ten meters I'd be laughing so hard.
It is
not possible to achieve
anywhere near the same results as you get from hand coding a website with a WYSIWYG application. If you were an experienced web designer, you
would not find it easier to use a WYSIWYG application, and I hope I never come across a web designer who uses WYSIWYG applications because they are "easier" and "get the same results." You simply
cannot compare the two methods of creating a website.
I don't know about you, but I write beautiful code. Everything I write (with regards to HTML and CSS) is semantic and well-laid out. It
makes sense. I use unordered lists for navigation and correctly leveled headers. I don't touch the line-break tag and I wouldn't even think about placing a non-contextual image inline. It's all about separating content from style. Find me a WYSIWYG application which can do that, all along naming attributes correctly and making the code as easy to update as possible, and I'll eat my hat. Such an application does not, and will never (or not until computers can use common sense) exist.
durbs said:
ignore all the PHP stuff, .NET makes it look like a joke language.
That's the biggest load of rubbish I've read since... well, since ten minutes ago when I read the first half of that post.
av.
