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

[Sam-I-Am]

There's another point of view that needs voicing here. 
For a lot of projects in which HTML is involved, redundant code, poorly
nested tags and all kinds of offensive garbage code really don't matter.
As much as it pains me to say it. The business objectives and context
for a project sometimes just don't justify the time needed to pick over
the code and clean it up with each update.
Look at MS Word -- the amount of crap stored in the average Word file
beggars belief - just shuffle along with the cursor and you'll typically
see bold carriage returns, italic empty spaces etc. But the document
reads and prints fine.. that's all that is required of it. 
The same goes for **some** web sites (and particularly intranet sites),
where communication is the primary goal, and yes maintenance and build
time are factors, but defining requirements to necessitate the
employment of a high bill-rate web specialist can be expensive folly. 

This is entirely separate from the whole WYSIWYG vs hand coding thing.
You can write perfectly awful code by hand quite easily. But if the goal
is to create a document that people can read.. what's the quickest path
to get there? Put on the other guy's shoes and think about what his
priorities are. Why not offer to create DW templates for him (which you
can do in vi if you feel like it) and exert a positive influence that
way?

Sam
hand-coding zealot and high-bill-rate web specialist since '96