[thelist] Using Your Tools Effectively (was My 12 year old son can do websites)

[RUST Randal]

John Allsopp said:

> >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?

Being in the IT Consulting industry, I can answer that with an emphatic
"yes."

My team codes by hand, using Homesite. We ran into a situation a couple
of weeks ago that clearly spelled out that we needed to start using a
more robust tool that would manage some things for us -- like
dynamically updating links -- and we will be moving to Dreamweaver MX. 

But I still want us to hand code, and I want to speed up that process.
However, a dependence on tools to generate code can lead to nothing but
trouble. 

So what I am in the process of doing is writing Dreamweaver Extensions
that will dramatically decrease the time it takes us to write the code.
These extensions will also validate the values of the user input, so
when we go to do markup validation, it should be smooth sailing.

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Randal Rust
Covansys Corp.
Columbus, OH