Building your first website is very easy when you use a WYSIWYG. But is it still feasable to use such a program when building more complicated sites or should you switch to hand coding?

Why hand code at all?
A lot of people are used to coding in different languages and they see WYSIWYG editors as ‘cheating’ and they will not be seen doing anything like that. Others, me included, feel they have more control over the code if everything is typed in by hand. How often I haven’t seen code like <b></b><b>bold</b> when someone was trying to make something bold in a WYSIWYG editor.

There are a number of different HTML generators, including: Dreamweaver, Frontpage, MS Word, and a number of wizards you can use on ‘build your own website sites’. Let’s forget about that last categorie and MS Word as they either leave no room for change, or make such bad code that no one would seriously consider using them. Now I don’t know much about the newer versions of Frontpage, it used to be horrid, making more code for a simple bold tag than you’d need for an entire page.

That leaves Dreamweaver, which is a rather good program. One of it’s good points is that you have everything in one program. You can view your code on top of the screen, the result in the bottom, your files, and all things you do with it close at hand. By selecting the right option from the menu you can build div’s (layers), tables and everything else you want. Drag and drop css, no need for remembering any code, just find the right menu and enter the information you want. And in the code view you can see what it does so any extra code can be removed.

And, not a bad things also, you can get code hints. When you’re typing a tag it shows a list of things you might be typing. But, then you’re typing already you might say. Indeed, there’s actually no reason why you can’t move to hand coding in Dreamweaver.

I would say, use the WYSIWYG only for settings things up, and do the details by hand. That way you get the best of both world.

Personally however, I’m still doing everything by hand in Crimson Editor, which only shows colours with correct code, and does nothing fancy like autocompletion or giving code hints.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 at 1:14 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Webdevelopment, Html. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.