Post lightly edited 5:07 PM 7/29/03: some stuff got changed by mistake in a project I’m working on, and I thought it wasn’t by mistake. My mistake, and I griped about it. Changes indicated in italics.
Old (in internet years) joke: Q: What’s the difference between coders and designers? A: Designers know they can’t code.
I’m frustrated today, because the months of work I put in learning about CSS and then planning, composing, and revising an elegant, readable, and well-commented CSS layout stylesheet seem to have gone out the window.
The short version:
Dreamweaver’s dialog boxes turned most of what I’d done into a sloppy, cluttered, illegible, and non-commented stylesheet. As fine and convenient an application as Dreamweaver is, it’s pretty dumb when it comes to the actual code, and sometimes when things break, you have to go in and fix them by hand. Which is when comments and cleanly written code are very helpful.
Basically, Dreamweaver’s fault. I’ve got a backup.
I’m no expert with Web technologies. I know a little, and I’ve taken the time to learn how to do some stuff with CSS. So: call me the equivalent of the designer who at least knew he couldn’t code.
Soon to be fixed, with no harm done. As usual, I’m too quick to gripe.
I hear you re: Dreamweaver. Basically, I have better luck using it as a fancy-schmancy text editor. It’s more trustworthy that way, though perhaps less wing-dingy.
Knowing a little vi never hurt anybody.
Yeah. I wrote the stylesheet in a text editor, but I’m working with other folks who know and are more comfortable the DW interface, and so we ran it through DW. Might as well have run it through a coffee grinder, the way it came out.
Really, Curtiss, vi? Emacs is more natural for non-hackers as long as the key-binding are reasonable for your platform.
I’ve yet to find a WYSIWYG HTML editor that doesn’t produce completely mangled output barely suitable for a machine to read. Maybe they think that obfuscates the coding making it harder to steal, but more likely they just don’t care and most people never care to look at the raw output.
I’m sorry if I sounded as if I were wagging a finger, Mike. Actually, I was under the impression that DW emitted pretty good looking code–I’ve never used it myself–but I guess there are limits.
Gerry, you’re right. Emacs is far better when the key-bindings are good. I understand that vim (which I use on my Windoze machine at home) is very nifty and can be quite the pleasant end user experience, but I end up using it like vi.
Curtiss — didn’t take it that way, don’t worry. (Well, OK, maybe there was a little “I don’t need no stinkin DW” pride in my response.:) DW does OK w/ HTML, if you don’t mind redundancy, and it really is convenient as hell. But it does bad, bad things to stylesheets, like turning one simple works-for-all-4-sides padding instruction into one for each side, scattered intermittently through the rest of the stuff for that element, rather than grouped together. And chews up your nice, legible spacing. And deletes comments. And — well, you get the idea. Honestly, I didn’t recognize what I’d written.
Maybe I’m being dismissive, but I don’t like any WYSIWYG editors, Dreamweaver included. I find it easier to just learn and use the code, put it in Notepad, save changes, open it up in a browser, edit, save changes again, hit refresh on the browser, etc.