[thelist] Hand Coding (was Dreamweaver Codewriting)

[Kostal Design | Sebastian Kostal]

> Sebastian, I gotta say you sound just like me some years ago, because I was
> making the same
> arguments. I'm not saying you have to abandon MM completely or never use it,
> and I'm not saying
> there are not times when you maybe should use it.
>
> But, until you go out into the "unknown" as it were and walk a mile in a
> hand-coder's shoes, you
> aren't speaking from a clear viewpoint. You can't "see" from the hand code
> side, and since you
> don't have that experience, your opinions on one vs. the other are somewhat
> invalid.

I actually started out hand-coding, because I did not want a program to
control what I am doing. This was especially true for HTML. I actually
opposed to using Dreamweaver an entire class, because I wanted to learn it
the right way.

But finally I had to admit, that Dreamweaver in general just writes cleaner
code than I do. Also getting visual feedback is very important to create a
well designed page in my opinion and Dreamweaver does a pretty good job
doing this. And You always have the code it generates right in front of you
as well.

I see myself more as Graphic Designer than programmer (at least that's where
I have my degree in), but as you know the boundaries are very diffused in
this field. I don't intend to become a full-on programmer, because you
cannot do everything well. I want other people to take over this part later.
But for this time, the Dreamweaver approach is certainly a good solution and
it works well.

On te other hand I know this List is full of people not like me, which makes
it so interesting and that's why I subscribed to it. I had the feeling I can
learn alot.

I still cannot see the advantages, why I should work differently, though. I
mean, you are not really sitting down and writing out the whole thing
manually, are you? You have at least some aid that takes this tedious typing
away from you.

Here's another point: You don't write PostScript by hand when designing
printed pages either? Eventually Web Design, at least form the Layout and
visual point of view, will be like working in QuarkXPress, weather you like
it or not. Of course we are not this far, but it will happen. I bet there
are still DTP operators that know Postcript and write it, but this skill
will only be used to fix errors, not to design. My opinion.


Sebastian