Any True HTML writers out there

[ha-lf]

I use Frontpage 2.0 for the main layout of my webpages, but everything else I do with notepad. Coding is supposed to be fun so why use WYSIWYG-editors then...

[ZomBieMann77]

I use good old fasion notepad for most of my work. allthough i have been known to use dream weaver on ocasion.Personlay i dont like front page. dont ask me why cause i dont know. But the purest is the best and i have NEVER seen a wysiwyg editor that didnt throw ina bunch of extra bullcrap code

[Jupes]

I started a little over 8 years ago learning HTML by saving pages, opening them in Notepad, and reverse engineering them again to learn how it all worked. Having a through understanding of the code can be very useful. But these days if I am designing a site I will use Dreamweaver out of convenience. While there is the whole pride-in-doing-it-all-yourself thing, using a combination of the features of web development packages with manual coding is much more efficient. I doubt there would be many professional web designers who could get away with totally manually coding their sites. As a customer I wouldn’t accept being charged for something that could have been achieved much quicker with the assistance of a common commercial package.

[fourdc]

When I was learning the basics I did cheat by doing the basic page with Composer, but then I would edit out the Netscape garbage with 1stPage. Then I saw how easy it was to script a basic page.

[ts.flatline]

I agree with delta4ce that actually knowing code gives a person a certain pride, i felt that when i actually learned code and stopped using that homestead site editor stuff. But the programs like Dreamweaver do help with making a template a lot faster, so nothing against the people that use the programs and know their stuff.

[ShippMA]

I always code in raw form, i hate trying to use frontpage and dreamweaver, in fact i'm just graduating and looking for a job in web design, except most say that experience is needed in dreamweaver, it's a right pain in the ass!

[GreekGoddess]

It really surprises me the amount of people who don't use Dreamweaver for layout. In my opinion there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's just extra work that you're creating for yourself when you really don't have to. It's my opinion that you should never rely heavily on a WYSIWYG editor, but, like I stated before in my previous post...there's really no point in handcoding image slices when a program can do it for you, faster without any hassle. If you want to waste your time, go for it, but in all honestly...what's the point?

[pwaring]

Originally posted here by GreekGoddess
It really surprises me the amount of people who don't use Dreamweaver for layout. In my opinion there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's just extra work that you're creating for yourself when you really don't have to. It's my opinion that you should never rely heavily on a WYSIWYG editor, but, like I stated before in my previous post...there's really no point in handcoding image slices when a program can do it for you, faster without any hassle. If you want to waste your time, go for it, but in all honestly...what's the point?

You have to remember that Dreamweaver is pretty expensive though - I certainly can't afford to fork out £100+ for a piece of software. Sure, it might pay for itself in the long run, but that's only of use if you have the money in the first place.

Hand-coding things isn't necessarily a waste of time, if you do nothing but handcode (like I do), you can get very fast at it to the point where it just isn't worth purchasing and learning how to use WYSIWYG programs like Dreamweaver. I realised this when I tried using Netscape Composer to create a nested table layout a couple of years back - it was quicker to just write the code myself - that way I knew exactly what was happening. When you have plently of CSS/HTML to copy/paste from (again, like I have set up), it really doesn't take that long to get a site up and running, from which you can tweak the design in the HTML as you see fit.

I won't deny that WYSIWYG editors have improved drastically over the last three years, but they're still not quite as good as hand-coding. It's a bit like the Assembly/C argument - you can still program in assembly and your programs might be slightly smaller and run faster, but now C compilers are so good that there's no need for assembly except at the very lowest level where you *have* to have direct hardware manipulation. I think Quake (the first version) was the last major game where an assembly programmer was asked to optimise the code.

Anyway, I'm digressing a bit here, the main point is: use Dreamweaver, Frontpage et al if you want, but I'll stick with my good old text editors for the time being.

[techtech]

Personally, after viewing some personal pages of AO members here, I remember why it is that I don't create webpages, I have absolutly no artistic eye. I cannot do what members like GG have done, and others, but I do know how to write a basic webpage in notepad, and I teach it to 5th and 6th graders. Not so much that they can learn, but so that they can appreciate what the computer industry is, and not take it for granted....

[fourdc]

techtech,

Don't knock your "artistic" self. I'm not artistically inclined but the pages I created and maintain for people convey the message to the target. They are plain, uncluttered.

There are some pages out there that are too artistic and fail. When you go to a website to find the date, just the date, of a concert tour and you absolutely have to lave the latest version of Flash so you can glean a month, day and year. And of course the version you downloaded last weeks isn't the latest. I always look for the TEXT version of web pages.

I was teaching Communications merit badge to some Boy Scouts. In order for communication to succeed there has to be a message, medium, sender and receiver. The receiver has to accurately receive the message the sender sent. Sometimes there is no room for art.