Choose your HTML editor with care
Friday July 14, 2006
If you're a Web designer, it will be the first tool you open in the morning and the last one you close at night (assuming you actually leave your desk...). Having an HTML/Web page editor that does what you need it to do is very important. And remember, price shouldn't be your first deal breaker. If you're going to use this tool every day, and the one with all the features you want costs a little more, then you should seriously consider buying it. You'll get your money's worth.
Comments
I have been a web designer for many years now and started off just using notepad to make my html design, this is a good way to learn coding because you get no help! Now I use Dreamweaver for the html, mostly because I use Flash now! which I think is the future of online! Html can be very easy just learn the code and thats all you need. If your looking for a site yourself go to my website Ledinarts.com
I have to disagree with:
“The biggest advantage that [WYSIWIG] editors have is that you don’t need to know HTML to put up a Web page.”
That’s like saying the biggest advantage to cheap Yamaha keyboards with the blinking lights over the next key to press in the preprogrammed song is that you don’t have to know how to read music to play piano. It’s not an advantage to enable people to more effectively turn out tripe.
I too (as did Corey above) began coding with a text editor. And I started at it years ago, when the web was young (early to mid nineties), and I was twelve. So anyone who says that they need a WYSIWYG editor because they can’t type in angle brackets is admitting they’re dumber than a twelve-year old. (Ironically, many of these WYSIWYG editors have a steeper learning curve than HTML, in return for which they churn out their recognizably mediocre schmutz).
Yes, WYSIWYG editors may make it easier for some folks to get something on the web, but that’s not always a good idea. Wouldn’t it be better to encourage good coding practices (especially in this the simplest of all common programming languages: HTML!) than to hide it under the hood and tell folks “You won’t understand . . . “? While it may not start out “easier”, both they and their readers will be glad they put in the effort.
No, WYSIWYG editors have no place. Neither do “play-along” keyboards. They both have no purpose but to facilitate inadvertent tripe production by those who don’t know any better.
WYSIWYG does have a place, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. Nobodies got time if you’re dishing out 100 page websites for clients to do it manually, that’d be an excercise in blatant stupidity. Not everyone’s an anal retentive coding geek either, most designers are visual and don’t see everything in code, thats why I prefer using dreamweaver cos I can see what my finished product will look like eventually.
“Nobodies got time if you’re dishing out 100 page websites for clients to do it manually”
What’s the difference between typing between div or p tags and typing in a WYSIWYG? If you use CSS, the only thing you’re changing on each of those 100 pages is content.
Just because you can create a page template in FP or DW, write, save, clear it out, and do it all over again - doesn’t mean it’s faster than using a hand coded template, with a content div, and typing inside that.
Let the world just sit back and rejoice at the wonder of CMS! Then you just type your little heart out, press “save” and be done with it! However you’ll need to hand code the design, so I suppose if you’d rather not, you can sit back in the dark ages with all the others…
Hey Keith its funny I started when I was just 11yrs old, damn we were crazy kids