[thelist] real men code by hand...

[Matt]

Eike Pierstorff wrote:

> Dreamweaver sometimes 'forgets' to remove code that is no longer needed
> when you change the site, you have to remove it with a text editor. But
> maybe that's just me, I never learned to use DW properly.

Dreamweaver 4+ has a great feature, "Clean Up HTML", which removes empty
tags, redundant nested tags, combines redundant tags and even will remove
tags that you specify. And believe me, if you think this is only useful for
DW coded pages, you haven't had to deal with some of the hand-coded pages
I've been given ;)

Also, I'm not sure how Microsoft Word got thrown in to the discussion as a
WYSIWYG editor (not by you Eike, by someone else) buts it NOT, its merely a
word processor with some crappy HTML capability built in. That being said,
Dreamweaver 4 also has a another great command, "Clean Up Word HTML", which
removes all the crap that Word inserts. Very useful when you're handed a
page that was obviously exported from Word.

Dreamweaver has also become much smarter about removing unneeded code, and
not inserting endless strings of repetitive tags. It also makes it
incredibly easy to use CSS, so anyone who still uses <FONT> tags, I don't
think you can blame DW, but rather the person. The Javascript is definitely
over the top though. Throw in a couple "Show/Hide Layers" and some "Swap
Images" and you'll end up with a good 40 lines of script :(

In my opinion (and this totally contradicts the way MM tries to sell it)
only someone who knows how to code by hand should be using Dreamweaver.
Nobody expects Photoshop to make them an artist (well ok, some people do),
why should Dreamweaver make you a web designer? Its merely a tool that if
used properly facilitates certain parts of the process.

Our next topic should be: "real men work in 300 dpi". Can we talk about the
web /programmers/ who fancy themselves designers who create all their art
in 72 dpi 3 layer photoshop docs and then expect you to convert it for
print? ;)

matt