I think we’ve all seen the web pages that boast: “Created with NOTEPAD.EXE” or some similar sentiment. Or we’ve at least known a webphile who insists that a flat text editor is the only proper way to create an HTML document.
Here is one thing that Tim Berners-Lee, who invented HTTP, HTML (duh, the WWW) had to say on the subject in his book “Weaving the Web”, which echoed my sentiments exactly:
Allright then, I know you are out there. Lets do battle. My first point of contention is not against those who say its more efficient to write straight HTML (I’ll get to you later) but to those of you who feel you are better people for writing HTML with notepad.exe or edit.exe or COPY CON or whatever archaic method you’ve been unable to divorce yourself from (despite the fact that HTML editors have existed as long as HTML has existed).
Please, do not let this become a VI/EMACS/PICO or whatever fest. Lets just focus on the generic trend of writing HTML with a flat text editor rather than the way it was designed.
I know you have a valid defense, and I want to hear it.
I don’t want code that I didn’t place there knowingly myself. I use Allaire Homesite because it is, like Word, a drag-and-drop text editor. I have used notepad frequently, and I have no problem with it except it’s a lot more typing and limiting.
But writing the pure code by hand means you know exactly what’s being put in there, and using an editor allows you to work faster and more efficiently, especially for things like validation and multiple page changes.
When I was dealing with server side parsing and tried one of them there fancy schmancy HTML editors (forget which, it was 1995ish) it would make complete hash out of my code.
It’s been emacs since then. Same reason I drive a manual transmission vehicle.
Ok well I don’t know what server side parsing has do with HTML (especially in '95 before Active Server or whatever) but I have to second the standard transmission. It kicks. I was thinking of analogies like this one, and of course I couldn’t use this one because I drive stick and love it. So what I came up with was this:
Suppose the first car ever made, the engineers decided the braking system was decidedly not user-friendly, and eventually came up with an anti-lock braking system to combat skid and swerving on wet roads. Then, five years later some ‘purist’ decides that he can actually control the brakes better than the ALBS and implements a brake that is much simpler, more prone to error, frustration and accident. And he calls it better.
Solution:
People who need the help or can’t code HTML or just want to, can use FrontPage. People who can use HTML can eke out that last little percent of use from it, just like a race driver with non-antilock brakes. It doesn’t make someone a better person, just someone more familiar with HTML.
I could write all of my pages by hand, sure. I know HTML and I’m as familiar with it as the next guy.
But I generally don’t. I do a LOT of updating in HTML, because UndeadDude wrote me a fancy online editor that lets me edit anything on my server through a text web interface, and it’s convenient. I also do a lot of fine-tuning in raw HTML. But for laying out a page, bite me. Yeah, I COULD do it in raw html, but why should I? I have better things to do with my time than type HTML tags by hand when the end result is the same. I spend my time designing the layout, creating the graphics, and writing the text. I use an editor to let me drag and drop, create tables, merge cells, etc. Then I go into the code and make sure it didn’t do anything stupid. Yeah sometimes it throws in extra FONT tags that aren’t needed, but I can live with that. It’s FASTER and my time is more important to me than what people think of me.
Like I said, I’m as familiar with html as any notepad/pico/whatever person is.
It’s important for me to use a web page creation program for speed. I must know HTML for the fine tuning & knowing what code should be there and what should not & its important to know it in order to make things work right.
There are free web sites that can ‘clean’ your HTML code for you…
Opalcat is right. When you have to maintain a large number of pages, you’re concerned with ease and speed. I’d hate to have to create a complicated table in HTML – it would take me hours as opposed to minutes with FrontPage.
HTML is useful knowledge, especially for tweaking web pages, but it’s madness to use it as your primary web editor when you’re doing a large number of pages or an entire site.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
This is exactly why we use a calculator instead of the abacus. Efficiency.
“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
~P.J. O’Rourke~
Yeah Uncle, but how many kids today can’t figure out 10% of something if the damn cash-register is down?..While I agree that if you have a ton of pages, or just want to do some quick tweaking, a WYSIWYG editor is prefered, I believe you should at least have a basic understanding of what HTML is. When I taught my HTML class’s, how else can I demonstrate how somebody put together a page if I don’t view the code and see how they put it together?..If you were an automobile designer, would it be enough to know how to drive the car without knowing how it works?..I guess that the HTML vs. Graphical Editor debate is extreamly similar to the DOS vs. Windows debate. The graphical interface means that more people have access to building web pages, and provides the opportunity for a truely World Wide Web. But unless someone keeps a knowledge of HTML, who is going to develope all those neat features that everyone likes?..Like applets?..or different Java Scripts?..Just as Windows has allowed more people to utilize computers in their day to day lives, FrontPage and such have allowed them to join the web community. But if nobody knows how it really works, who’s going to fix it when it breaks?..I mean if something freaks out in your FrontPage site, and you know nothing about HTML, could you figure out how to fix it?..Or just start all over again…
I’ll have to confess to being a Notepad HTMLer for most of my life, but I’ve never had to do a lot of HTML. The primary reason was that I didn’t like any of the editors that were available to me. However, since I’ve discovered the really excellent editor built into Netscape I’ve used that. It’s WYSIWYG, fast, not too complicated and very capable. So I’m a convert.
“If ignorance were corn flakes, you’d be General Mills.”
Cecil Adams The Straight Dope
[ul][li]It’s how I learned it 3 years ago when I didn’t know there was any other way to do it – and you know what they say about old dogs.[/li][li]I don’t have enough space on my hard drive to load any more programs and I’m too cheap to buy anymore right now.[/li][li]I can almost always tell when someone has used a web page creator instead of writing their own code - especially when I view the source and see all of the completely useless tags that are junking up the page.[/li][li]I’m a control freak and if I haven’t done it myself, I don’t feel like I really did it.[/ul][/li]
The only exception I make to this is when it comes to javascript. I have no shame in taking someone else’s codes and putting them on my page. The problem is, when they don’t work, I don’t know how to fix them. It makes a good argument for why it’s important to learn the “how’s” of coding.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
I am a designer, not a programmer so I use FrontPage.
That said, that doesn’t mean designers shouldn’t know some HTML coding. FrontPage 2000 puts out better coding than its prior versions, but one still should verify coding before it’s published to the web.
Oh, and the best way to see if your pages look right should use Opera to find out the problems with your site.
NOW, if it were up to me, Netscape and Microsoft would get over their little battles and create a standard by which everyone can see a web page the same!
Using a WYSIWYG program does not mean stupid. Again, some of us are not programmers and choose not to learn every intricate detail of HTML coding – I am more into the visual aspects of a page than I am with the source code.
OpalCat, I totally didn’t mean to offend. One of my reasons someone should use FrontPage et al was because they “just want to”.
It totally makes sense to use things to create large complex pages (e.g. huge tables) It sounds like you are using exactly the system I was trying so ineloquently to suggest:
Use FrontPage when you want to
Fine tune using HTML when you must/want to.
BTW, the last time I had to make complex pages (1996/97) the worst I had to deal with were horking huge tables, which I had to get from Excel, so I used the Excel HTML generation. The tags were ugly, but it saved me a lot of time and I could clean it up in emacs very easily. I think this is what we’re talking about.
I really didn’t mean to assign a value judgement to using an HTML tool vs. bare text - my statement
was the product of a foggy mind operating at midnight. What I would have said if my brain were ticking over properly is
OpalCat sez:
Opal, I think you do a great job and I don’t care what tools you use. I think no less of you and I apologize for having given that impression.
I maintain a web structure (couple of hundred pages) for work, but it is not my promary responsibility. I want to spend as little time messing with it as possible. So I use base HTML.
*What?<.i>
That’s right. I winvested work in the front end to write scripts that parse data files and generate the appropriate web pages. I schedule the scripts to run at regular intervals (dependent upon the volatility of the data) and now the site pretty much maintains itself. If I need to interfere, I can often get by with simply adjusting the flat files with vi.
Damn – it’s amazing what one can do with a real operating system.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
In the spirit of Techchick’s post, I am a programmer first, and a designer second. So, I use base html. I actually find if faster to do it that way, because I know exactly how tags will behave, and I can write exactly what I want to display.
And javascript is a big plus too.
And Spiritus, that would have gone better if you’d actually closed your italics.
