[thelist] re: My 12 year old son can do websites

john at johnallsopp.co.uk john at johnallsopp.co.uk
Thu Jan 29 04:15:44 CST 2004


Hi ppl

I've been working through these responses and I'm kinda curious about
something.

Someone said we should explain the difference between hand-coded HTML and
WYSIWYG-produced HTML. Well, what are the benefits to the client?

John Bullas showed his 7 line HTML page produced by Word as a monumental
pile of stuff, but it seemed to me that what was included was half
interesting. As the semantic web train trundles towards us, won't us hand
coders become out of date? Won't it be much much harder (more expensive,
more prone to error) to produce web pages with all the additional markup?
Won't we wake up one day to find the Dreamweaver people have taken over
and can produce semantically marked up web pages cheaper, faster and with
higher quality than we can by hand?

Is the main problem with WYSIWYG software that it doesn't do it very well
(proprietary/redundant code, that kinda thing)? Perhaps that the code is
overcomplex so it's difficult to maintain and when a problem arises, it's
difficult to fix. But as the software improves, and the complexity of the
task increases, won't there be a moment when, sensibly, we should switch?

For instance, no-one suggested I should hand code that P3P stuff, because
it was an XML file .. every suggestion was that I needed a WYSIWYG aid.
Yet the file itself was fairly clear.

Now, I've just very successfully finished a degree in Internet Computing,
and I've always been a hand coder. But this stuff can take an awful long
time to produce by hand. Won't everyone's desire for a quick fix win in
the
end?

J



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