Do it by hand
To anyone who’s ever asked me why I “bother” to hand code everything instead of work with a WYSIWYG, I’m finally validated by the NY Times design director:
It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results. But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.
Via Boingboing, via Slashdot (which I finally stopped reading).
While I’m sharing link content relevant to hand coding methodology this morning (since this blog has taken a turn for the philosophical recently), make sure you check out the <em>Confessions</em> of a CSS Developer. Some of my favorites (and own confessions) include:
- Everything before IE6 is dead to me
- I passionately use the * {margin:0; padding:0} rule. Sometimes I feel rebellious and add border:0
- I will seriously cry when all browsers fully support CSS 3
In light of the first half of this post, I’m willing to overlook confession #12 for the sake of the humor/accuracy in rest of them.
All coding at Fusebox/Empressr gets done by hand, CSS creation and editing is aided by the very awesome tool, CSSEdit.
Yo Bryan! When are we gonna see you down in the ‘Illadelph?
CSSEdit is pretty slick, though for me it just gets in the way more than it helps. But they have created a good product that helps create good code, and I’m into that!
It was the same at News. All coders code by hand. We let them use whatever tool they want to do it, but we make sure they can code by hand before we hire them.
I had no idea this was still considered an unusual concept in large scale web publishing/production. I just thought everybody did it these days. It is the only way to assure code quality and cross-browser/platform consistency!
But we knew that already, right?
Here at Delta Angel Design, all coding is by hand and we are just delighted with the results. Makes the staff smarter, too!
WYSIWYGs are the devil…A lot of them alter your code into ALL CAPS and some of them even remove apostrophes! For example they will turn the following code:
into
The worst thing I’ve ever seen is exporting to HTML from Microsoft Word. Just ridiculously awful results.
I think you need to modify the first one; even IE6 is dead to me.
As web developers, where business rules allow it, we must stop always thinking backwards compatibility is a goal. IE6 is an awful browser and we shouldn’t have to jump through hoops unless the 1.5% of people that still use it (or whatever the number is) is critical for the site to be successful. I’ve even stopped caring in a lot of my projects if 24-bit PNGs with alpha transparency render poorly under IE6.
That all being said, I’m not quite sure how you would develop anything but a trivial site using something like Dreamweaver. I don’t even put it on my resume; and when I was recruiting, I would consider touting Dreamweaver proficiency as a negative (probably one of the reasons I wasn’t a successful chop-shop recruiter)
I use Dreamweaver, but just use the code view when I’m building the layouts. Since most of what I design is a theme or template for a CMS, the design view doesn’t get used much unless I’m doing an HTML email.
>>The worst thing I’ve ever seen is exporting to HTML from Microsoft Word. Just ridiculously awful results.
I can do one better, I actually had to fix a site generated in MS PUBLISHER. And it wasn’t created by the owner’s relative either, they actually paid a “designer” to do it.
I don’t understand why Dreamweaver gets such a bad rap. It doesn’t mess with your code, at least not that I have ever seen. And it makes so many things just one click easier.
It understands the directory structure of your ftp site. I can be editing a file, I type crtl-s, then ctrl-shift-u and the page/file slides on up to the server. I don’t have to switch windows, I don’t have to pay attention to the working directory I am in.
It’s great for finding my place in a page. I go to design view (ctrl-~), click on the spot I want to edit in the code and ctrl-~ again and I am there. It has buttons for selecting parent tags, code collapse and a good find and replace.
(one of my complaints about it is that it won’t search ALL files, just the ones it thinks it wants to.)
It validates html as you go, so you can see if you have a mistake. I can’t tell you how many times I have found nesting and tag closure errors in html that was hand coded in a text editor.
The code completion saves me keystrokes all the time.
It’s handy for finding colors. I always need to create a slightly different shade of one of the colors in my color scheme for a particular element of content…say a table row background color…and I can do that easily in DW, trying out a number of different shades til I get the one that’s right.
I could work in homesite, notepad++, or komodo edit(my 2nd choice). After 10 years I know the html and css by heart. But it would just be inconvenient.