[thelist] WYSIWYG x-browser design - is it a reality?

[Matt]

I don't think it's a question of whether you do or do not code by hand, but
rather whether you CAN or CANNOT code by hand. You are a coder in my opinion,
who makes use of the convenience of a WYSIWYG editor w/out letting it take over
his code. I find Dreamweaver highly convenient, but I also spend probably
greater than 50% of my time in the code window and therefore never lose touch
with the code or let redundant tags slip through. But if I'm laying out a
simple table, I just can't waste my time doing it by hand when DW will do it in
seconds and do it well. I think alot of the problems arose from older versions
of Dreamweaver, where if you clicked on a CSS style three times, it would
insert it 3 times, and similar oddities that could destroy a good page, so
you'd end up with the kinds of things you guys are talking about, where the
<TR>, <TD> and <SPAN> each have a different style, AND there's two separate
<FONT> tags on the same section of text.

The irony is that ultimately, a wysiwyg editor is only useful in the hands of
someone who doesn't need it. I think companies like Macromedia have done a real
disservice as marketing their software as Web Design For Dummies packages. And
it's only going to get worse with UltraDev, which is being marketed as Backend
For Dummies.

The other irony is that I've dealt with hand-coded pages that were nightmares
as well, and the people who gave them to me probably would consider themselves
better than me just because they did it by hand, even though the pages were
littered with crappy code.

Matt

Brad Miller wrote:

>
> People's opinions on this subject always interest me because some people say
> if you don't use notepad or the like your not a real HTML programmer.
> And yet I save myself hours of tedious typing by using Homesite and still
> have clean code without font tags and all that crap. I am just as anal about
> my code as the next hand coder, but I can't see spending extra time typing
> something that I can do with a click or a hotkey. Not only that but it also
> eliminates spelling mistakes that take forever to track down.