Handcoding by Paul Scrivens at Whitespace
To learn how anything works in this world most of the time you have to dig into the guts of it. You can not sit there and look at it and figure out what little intricacies make it tick. I can not look at a computer and tell you how it works. I could read a book and then tell you, but how could I tell you how much thermal grease should really be applied to a cpu/heatsink without having done so myself? If you want to understand your page then you have to make it…by hand.
Well I don’t like DreamWeaver. Commonplace. I hate WYSIWYG. You never can feel the structure of the page. It is similar to cooking, huh, wrong [mouse] movement and your spices transform the masterpiece into the [crap] something another. Maybe new one. Maybe good one. But it is not the thing you dream of. It’s ok for painting maybe. But it is wrong for web real online slots. I think so 😉
As for me the difference is in style of thinking.
Hand coding means structure/semantic/logical coding anf WYSIWYG means visual coding.
I hate WYSIWYG because of related style of thinking. It is ok for some dev, prototyping maybe, but not for web. I mean, _right web_.
So damn true!
Alex: “I hate WYSIWYG. You never can feel the structure of the page.”
M-mm. It depends on what kind of wysiwyg you’re using. For example, WYSIWYG in Wolfram Mathematica lets you create structured text with structure idealogically very close to that XHTML/CSS: there is tree-structured “cells” with meaningful names, such “Title”, “Heading”, “Topic”, “Subtopic”, “Text”, “Input”, “NimberedEquation” and so on. There is also wysiwyg “stylesheet” in the same file format – .nb (notebook). Of course, that thing can generate valid and nice MathML or valid and nice HTML with formulas in GIF-files. Finally you may treat it like “MS Word done right”. Styles in Word are really stupid and dirty, while in Mathematica they’re clean and nice as in good CSS.
And it’s still pure WYSIWYG =). But unfortunately, this is the only example of a good WYSIWYG for text documents I know. =(
Oh, i’ve forgotten. Typing strong (b), em (i), p and other frequently used formatting tags is very annoying even if you use a hotkeys.
What about “the right web”, website’s structure is very mm… intimate thing, so you can’t seriously use ANY wysiwyg tools because of HTML itself.
I think it’s not too hard to create something like semantically structured PDF with floating boxes and other web-features to be able create, for example, columns (fixed and floated, left/right, with rounded corners or not etc.) without having a pain in the ass (CSS hacks, many div-wrappers and other crap).
The most of the time is spended (wasted?) for workarounds (not only browser-specific, but technological), not work itself.
Someday there will be a heaven on the earth and we will have efficiency ratio close to 99%, not 30% as today =)
Moral of the story: wysiwyg “is bad” because underlying technology doesn’t allow it in the particular field (modern web-design).
Thanks for your comments, will check what is Wolfram Mathematica 🙂
Wysiwyg sucks, I can’t stand even looking at code generated from any Wysiwyg…
Why do i hand code everything i work on?
I like hand coding because it helps with my Search Rankings, it helps to make Valid Xhtml and Valid css, easy to manage, super easy to fix errors and change stuff around because you actually know the code your looking at and the web developer can keep the webpage less than half the size than a wysiwyg program editor or what ever you want to call them, They suck point blank..
Continue with the the good work on the blog. Do like it! :p Could use some more frequent updates, but i’m quite sure that you have got better or other stuff to do like we all do. =p
You are correct! WYSIWYG was designed for noobs who don’t even know what the code means while looking at it.
WYSIWYG is one of the reasons new programming students don’t learn to code very well. WYSIWYG makes them lazy! Inserts a bunch of “excrement” that you don’t really need. Take for example word processors. People would save huge amounts of space by using a text editor and mark-ups instead of a freaking WYSIWYG word processor.
What world are you all living in? A world where you do nothing productive, except research the tool – the computer – itself rather than getting stuff done WITH the tool?
WYSIWYG is a quantum leap in the advancement of computer software and hardware technology. Without it, my and billions’ of others’ documents would never get done.
I do a lot of math, and I could not have created and published 6 peer-reviewed math papers and a doctoral dissertation without MS Word and Design Science’s Mathtype.
I lived through the horror of mainframe computers in college, no support, pre-WYISIWYG, DOS commands. Always in the end, when one had to produce an actual document, one had to use a manual typewriter or print it by hand.
TeX/LaTeX are the most hideous pieces of garbages on earth.
If you want to study a tool for its own sake, study mathematics.
There’s lots of critical work that needs to be done in pure math.
Don’t waste time researching a computer for its own sake.
I forgot to mention: WYSIWYG is the ONLY major advancement in computer technology (both software and hardware) since 1970.
For example: We still do not have computers that cannot digitize analog video from VCRs and have logical video-editing software that actually works. We still do not have that basic technology. Whatever exists out there may work for about 6 months to a year, then ceases to work as bugs and registry-changes accumulate on one’s computer.