[thelist] real men code by hand...

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Sun Mar 17 13:26:01 CST 2002


> From: "Pat Meeks" <pmeeks at email.msn.com>
[...]
> I'm probably going to get killed for asking, but as someone who has
> coded in html (but I'm not an expert and have nowhere near the
> expertise of many list posters), I would appreciated it if someone
> could let me know what they mean when they say "code bloat" and could
> you post an example of how Dreamweaver "bloats" code and how it should
> be done using notepad?

without using a WYSIWYG editor, try a little experiment...

write up some content in MS Word... export it as HTML...

if you did it by hand, it would probably all be in simple <p> tags with perhaps
some inline <fonts> or more likely you'd have a block of CSS in the head
styling the page...

compare the two... the MS Wordified HTML is the bloat... it's choc full of stuff
you don't need, reduntant tags, unsupported elements, etc...

in some WYSIWYGs, if you make some text bold, then unbold it by selecting
it, then bold another chunk, or re-bold the text, you can sometimes end up
with:

<b></b><b>This <b></b>text<b></b> should be bold.</b>

but a hand coder might do this:

<strong>This text should be bold.</strong>

doesn't mean the hand-coder or the WYSIWYG will do what i say, but it's
merely an example... clearly there are terrible hand-coders, and clearly there
may be some remarkable WYSIWYGs...

> There have been countless debates on this issue, but I think I'm not
> alone in wanting more info. What is it that we should be doing to
> clean up our html if we are using programs like Dreamweaver?

remove stuff you don't need... whether it be overly-complex tables, or overly-
complex inline CSS... just try to find a simpler solution is all...




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