That’s what I get for composing on the fly in between bouts of slamming my head against oneof those oh-so-convenient GUI interfaces that is supposed to be making my life easier.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
I was a dedicated notepad coder.
Then Child 2 was born, henceforth known as Little Evil.
Between saving the cat from the applesauce beast and untimely baptisms in the toilet, stopping Little Evil from climbing the kitchen counter to make a PBJ that involves her buttering the heating coils in the toaster, painting the TV, colouring on the walls, cutting her sister’s hair, and scaling the furniture like Sir Edmund Hilary …
Logic dictated that an HTML editor was the only sane way to survive.
I still do a lot by hand. I go back in and change code. Opal and I send each other to look at pages when we’ve been staring at thousands of little brackets for hours trying to figure out why one non-compliant browser doesn’t look just like another one and how to fix the error. If we didn’t know how to code, that would be impossible to troubleshoot.
Convenience and Sanity.
I’d much rather know HOW to do something first, and then worry about making it easy.
Notepad. All the way, when vi isn’t available.
I like pretty formatting, and Frontpage just doesn’t cut it. It’s SO much easier to update your page when you know where everything is via nice indenting.
Frontpage blows chunks. A Microsoft product sucking? Whoda thunk it…(drip…drip…drip)
All you hand-coders are just gluttons for punishment. Maybe it makes your penis hard, but I don’t buy for a second that it is more efficient. There are many robust WYSIWYG editors out there, and they all allow for hand-coding where necessary. Typing in every bracket and symbol and tag…puhleeze. What’s teh point? You all must be world-class typists. Big whoop.
It really is the equivalent of word processing the way we did in 1984…how obnoxious. Do you guys do that, too?
puh.
stoid
who hates doing HTML no matter how easy they make it. Maybe if they get to the point where I can just tell the computer “link every occurance of the word “Sample” to the “sample” page.” I might enjoy it. Til then…I hire people.
Douglips: “horking”? I don’t know if that’s what you meant to write, but it’s a fun word!
Stoidela, in most HTML editors, especially the Drag and Drop and not the WYSIWYG so much, there are ways to do exactly like you said:
Homesite has a thing called Extended Find and Replace which if used cleverly, will allow you to do precisely what you are asking. It’s not perfect, but it’s close.
-PIGEONMAN-
Hero For A New Millennium!
The Legend Of PigeonMan - updates every Wed & Sat. If I can be bothered.
First of all, it’s irrelevant what the original author of HTML intended, because he also intended HTML to be a fairly simple page description language. HTML bears very little resemblance to the original HTML other than at the very basic level.
I use whatever tools are available to me. I’m currently building a corporate Intranet that has to connect to several SQL server databases and a whole bunch of other stuff. I use Visual Interdev, Frontpage, C++, Kedit (forget notepad), Homesite 3.0, and whatever other tools I have for specific jobs.
Complex HTML pages have to be edited in a text editor if for no other reason than to document the code. And if you have to document the code, you’d better understand it. And the only real way to understand it is to write it yourself, or at least have done enough writing of it that you can look at the output of your fancy WYSIWYG editor and comment it.
I need to find a new editor. Heh. I HATE Frontpage, that thing is a beast. What I use is very very old, does nothing fancy, just some basic layout stuff, tables, etc… you can’t even change font face with it. It does nicely indent things for me though.
I don’t think I’ve ever edited a page and NOT gone into the HTML to finish it…
The main gripe I have with my current editor is that it goes on frenzies sometimes and uses them instead of a space between EVERY WORD. Fortunately there is a find/replace feature that lets me fix that.
Oh, and the lack of find/replace in general is a good reason to avoid Notepad. I use an enhanced Notepad myself, for those things that I do edit in notepad, and it has a find/replace. FWIW, I do edit my header and footer includes in my text editor. 
–
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
hm. Re-reading my post it almost looked like I said I used frontpage. I don’t use frontpage (I have it though, because a client of mine’s site is all FrontPage based and so to edit it I have to use it). What I use is far less fancy than FP and far less intrusive.
–
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Anyone have any idea why the 9X version of notepad does not support find/replace while the NT 4.0 version does? This has always been a great mystery to me although it is not necessarily relevant to the current topic. Also I need to remind myself to try running the NT version of NT under 95, I’m sure it will work.
I’m desperately sure that I am missing something here. HTML is a markup language - although it allows inclusion of references to Java script, ActiveX controls and other bastardized functions it remains relatively simple and standard across platforms. The reality is that HTML as such is not terribly different now from what was originally hacked out on the NeXT - all the extentions are simply that and not really relevant to the discussion.
For myself, I will say that I look at the HTML tags much the same way that I looked at the old Wordperfect ‘View Codes’ mode. When something is messed up and doesn’t look right I look at it with a plain text viewer (usually through the editor available through front page)and fix it there. This becomes increasingly a rare occurrence as I get used to Front Page’s personality and learn to deal with it.
I have to say that I smirk at all the HTML ‘coders’ in much the same way that I smirk at all the ‘SQL’ coders. These are people who are using something that is essentially an end-product yet somehow confuse themselves with developers.
>cartman<Hey!>/cartman<
I used Front Page for a long time & every page need to be editted by hand before posting…so Im using Netscape Composer.
I also have business web site generator software, just input all the data, sit back & it makes it for you automatically. fun.
Cooper: Whether or not you are a ‘coder’ depends entirely on your methodology, and has absolutely nothing to do with the tools you are using. There are some pretty complex systems built in SQL that require all the advanced programming concepts to design and maintain, and there are some extremely poorly written hacks written by amateurs in assembly language, C++, or the ‘coders’ language of your choice.
It wasn’t that long ago that Visual Basic was considered to be an ‘end user’ solution, suitable only for beginners. Now half the large-scale enterprise apps are being built in VB.
HTML is very close to being a complete language, if you include the scripting components that can be used within. Add the inclusion of CSS, DHTML, scriptlets, ActiveX components, Java Classes, ASP, and all the other extensions to HTML, and you have a pretty complex environment.
I’m a ‘coder’ as you put it, having cut my teeth writing commercial software in ‘C’ ten years ago, and having a formal engineering/computer science education. And I’m working in web development right now, and it’s all the same old stuff. You design your project the same way, you build the client-server model, establish entity relationships, build algorithms, etc. etc.
Perhaps you are being a big snobbish because you resent all the newbies claiming to be ‘coders’ while you’ve been around for a while?