Summary of the following post: Hand coding is not dead and never will be. It is so much faster to use a text editor, whether it be BBEdit, emacs, vi, pico, whatever than using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive.
Sorry I wrote a lot and it is probably all 'blah blah blah', but if you are bored... read it.
First off, I actually
am a Web Designer. I go to my design office every day and sit down in front of a computer and work on graphics and web pages. TMy co-workers include a web programmer and the web design manager. The programmer is a computer science major and sort of old-school and can't get himself away from emacs. The manager majored in computer science and was hired when he was a student (the first student web designer in our department of the university). After having himself and the previous web programmer, the office found a need to have someone onboard who was not just a programmer, but more of a mix between graphic designer and programmer. So that brings myself to the job. We work in the marketing level of an area of the school that overseas many retail entities and student programming.
When I went to apply for the job, the first thing became evident that they would not even accept applications from people who could not write html and if they weren't able to write
valid xhtml and css the applications were put on the "only if we are in desperate need of someone" pile.
Sure, I know that many of you don't want to spend your life making websites and just do it for fun, but if you are considering making it you future, it is almost imperative that you completely drop the WYSIWYG editors and buy a copy of
BBEdit. Once you learn how to code html, css, php, asp, jsp, etc... then you will be much faster and more efficient that using a 'tool' to do it for you. It takes so much more time to sit there and look for the button to drag onto your project to place an image or to highlight some text and start filling in a form for where you want a link to go to. They also give you options that you don't understand what they do if you don't know the code. But that is the problem--they have to give the options for all of the extra stuff because sometimes they are needed--and it creates too much clutter and a bulky interface that takes more time to work with than just quickly typing out
Code:
<a href="/mypage.php">My Page</a>
racerx
I don't think it'll be too long before hard core hand coders are looked upon the same way we look at the Amish today.
You have got to be kidding. There will always be a need for people to code and program. Dynamic languages like php can't be written by a program because there are so many different ways of doing the same thing. There are too many different ways to make something function and so many personal needs to be met while coding something. And while someone is writing php and they need to format output, they have to write their html by hand. Formatting documents by hand gives a person so much more control over how it is actually going to work in a much faster way that trying to make the WYSIWYG do it the way that you want.
