By Jennifer Kyrnin

I knew that last week's article, WYSIWYG vs. Hand Coding, the Great Debate, would spark some controversy, but I was not expecting the flood of email messages that I received about it.

HTML is a relatively new language and so there are a lot of people who learned to write HTML before editors even existed. But there are also a lot of people who picked up a copy of Dreamweaver or PageMill and create really nice looking pages without ever once seeing a < or a >. Building Web pages is changing right beneath our noses.

John Zbikowski writes: things are different now than they were even a year ago because of new Web standards.... ...writing HTML by hand has gotten way too complicated...

But is it really the HTML that has gotten complicated? I agree that with JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, Java, and other tools, building a Web page is more and more complex. But the HTML is actually getting simpler. With the advent of XHTML, most of the design aspects of HTML are moving to CSS. Of course, all that said, it is much easier to use an editor to write those things. But that editor doesn't have to be WYSIWYG.

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