Why I DON'T use a WYSIWYG HTML Editor (HTML - scripting)

Member Name: wulf

Product:	HTML - scripting
Date:	26/09/01 (44 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Builds your understanding of HTML, Not tied to one program or operating system, The ability to tweak to your hearts content

Disadvantages: Does take more time than a GOOD HTML editing environment, Maybe not worth it if you only have very limited web-building ambitions

What program do you use to write your websites? There are plenty to choose from - CoffeeCup, Cute-HTML, Netscape Composer, FrontPage... and countless more. They come with bells and whistles all the way from automatically finishing tags for you to providing a interface like a Wordprocessor or DTP package and just generating all the HTML code behind the scenes. In fact, a lot of modern Wordprocessing software comes with the ability to save your pages as HTML, so on the face of it, there's no need to even buy any special software.

However, what I've generally chosen to use, over the course of years of experience and professional web design work, are just plain text programs that let me write the HTML directly. Why have I chosen to fly in the face of time-saving modern conveniences? Here are my reasons:

1. Text editors are free, easily available, and don't take up a lot of system resources. That becomes less of an issue as computer power increases - but I want to learn skills that I can transfer between different machines and operating systems. If I learn how a particular HTML editing package fits together, then I'll become dependent on that particular tool, which may not be so portable.

2. Writing HTML is the quickest way to understand HTML. Sometimes your pages will not act the way you expect, forcing you to either abandon what you're trying to do or look 'under the hood' at the HTML code. If you're used to dealing with raw HTML, this isn't as hard as it would otherwise be. After all, HTML is hardly rocket science - it essentially consists of wrapping your text in a limited range of angle-bracket enclosed <tags>.

3. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) is a dangerous illusion. What you see in an HTML editor is the way that HTML editor displays your page. Unless you are writing for a very specific audience (maybe a company intranet where everyone has a standard browser) you need to test your p
age on a range of different browsers. Writing raw HTML reminds me to think about the structure of the information more than the layout, and makes it easier to find solutions that will work for all visitors to my sites.

4. Related to the previous two points, getting your hands on the HTML allows you the maximum degree of control in fine-tuning it to your needs. Many HTML editing programs produce very messy code that is hard to read (and thus very hard to maintain if your original tool is no longer available). Even worse, some programs will take your hand-finished HTML and uglify it back to their own standards, undoing all your painstaking work.

5. When you use a specific tool, you are often quite limited in what you can do. You might be able to write basic HTML pages quickly, but will your editor start to frustrate you when you try to get into scripting with something like .asp or .php. Text editors are general purpose tools and can be adapted to all sorts of purposes.

Maybe this sounds too polemical for your tastes. Maybe you are quite happy with whatever program you have chosen and feel that it makes you more productive. It's not my place to censure the tools you choose to use. However, I have found that using text editors for most of my work has given me a very good understanding of the medium of web design. If you haven't tried handcrafting HTML, then maybe it would be worthwhile digging up a text editor and seeing what you can learn.

Nb. On Windows I normally use Editpad (http://www.jgsoft.com/); on Linux I opt for vim (http://www.vim.org/)... but even Windows Notepad will do at a push.

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