Preserved Topic: the gui editor "leap"

I've been hard coding my websites on an html editor (1rst page) and have grown very comfortable at it. I can get a good website finished reasonably fast, but alot of my collegues use gui editors and always cringe when I tell them I still hard code. "time consuming" they say. I've tried dreamweaver mx (the download) and I felt kind of discouraged. I'm sure I can learn the application with time, but I feel like I don't have as much controll. Especially when I look at some of the pages I've done in it, doesn't come out the same when I view it in an actual browser. Did anyone else go through the same thing? Is a gui editor a "must have" as they say.....

just wondering if i should take the

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By GUI do you mean WYSIWYG editor?

I don't really see to much of a point one way or the other about them. If its something you'd prefer to use, alright, if not just the same. If your happy where you are then stick doing what your doing.

It's all about personal preference. I would suggest MAX's HTML Beauty though.

-Jestah
Cell 277

yeah, I do mean WSIWYG editor. Is it any faster than hardcoding once you learn it. I have downloaded max's html beauty. Do you know any differences between it and 1rst page.?

personally speaking i use dreamweaver and love it. you can always go in on code view and do any tweaking there, what i normally do is get the rough layout in the wysiwyg interface then fine tune it as necessary in code view...

yeah, I can see that. But don't you find that how you view it in dreamweaver actually renders differently in a browser?

there are a few things ya can do to get round that.

what i always do is set the resolution of the design view mode to what ever resoution i want to display it in look on bottom right corner of display mode, then what i do is check the layout in different resoultions when i think the page is ready see if it falls apart or does any wierd shit as far as screen resoltion goes.

the next thing i do is set up my preview browsers in it and save it before previewing saves a lot of headaches later...

dont forget the demo versions are just that and sometimes they dont have bugs fixed in them that are resolved in the full versions and patches for them.

all in all i found dreaweaver to be the best and saves me shed loads of time.

As I keep saying, its a matter of personal preference.

I happen to work faster when Im writing the code myself. Off the top of my head I don't know how well DreamWeaver or 1rst impliment JavaScript or CSS so that would be a drawback IMO. I could download a trial version of either and check, but I'm content in writing my code in notepad, HTML beauty, and on napkins. This system works fine for me but it might not work for you. Evaluate yourself and the programs your looking at. Do these programs do everything that you do on a daily basis? If not and your going to have to code a good portion of it anyway in another program, whats the point in sinking money into it?

Thats just my thoughts.

-Jestah
Cell 277

yeah. I think I'll run with it a while. Well see. I guess its a matter of stepping out ou your comfort zone...

jestah yup ya perfectly right, as i said some of dw stuff does need tweaking but once learned those probs can be avoided CSS is supported and the scripting stuff is cool the debugger is neat and also also all colour coded, it may not be for the purists but it is now widely accepted as the industry standard for gui based web development, i use it everyday and i guess i got lazy with it now, but it saves time once ya into it, its just another learning curve not everyones cup of tea. but it sure as hell helps to know html well in case it does wierd things. but the code it generates is nice well structured and easilly read. and has lots of neat features in it like error trapping cross platform problems

MX is supposed to integrate well with the other programs also. Like CF and all that. I've noticed that alot of the job market (ie newpaper adds etc) requires one to know dreamweaver. So I guess it couldn't hurt to try.

NO. Absolutely not. Stick to your hand coding. WYSIWYGs restrict you to think in the way the program is designed. It will change the way you make web pages, and while it may go *faster*, in the long run it will restrict the creative process.

Aside from that, most WYSIWYGs produce invalid and bloated markup. Dreamweaver is actually getting much better about this, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

I would not know what I know today if I used a WYSIWYG.

I think that all of the MX series of products are made to integrate well with each other. Don't think they have added any special integration possibility to programs from other vendors.

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Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
- copied from the wall of cell 408 -

From a time/money standpoint I can see that upside of using a WYSIWYG editor. Hand coding allows you to fine tune, certainly a valid point. But you can always mock it up in WYSIWYG and fine tune it by hand. I dont feel that it really changes the way I design pages since thats done on paper first. The more time I spend plodding over code the less I like the project. If I did nothing but hand code I would completely lose interest in web design. Thats also because I feel I lean far more toward the creative end of the process, hand coding taxes my left brain functions to the detriment of my right brain so the problem is really mine alone. For you I would say go with what is most effective for you if you find that hand coding is costing you more time and frustration...well do you have the time to lose that money?

Editor of choice? I went back to using Dreamweaver 2.0 because DW 4.0 fucks up my code, they completely hozed the 'source code' entry mode, when you paste things into the source it just dosent come out right. On the rare occasion when I really want to hand code I use notetab light to supplement the WYSIWIG which is my primary tool. I usually do any meta tag each main page individually in a text editor for search engine optimization. Again, thats jut me....besides if you were really a 'leet web page desinger you would write your code in cuniform on papayrus you made yourself using pigments you ground by hand and then scan it in...text editors are for wussies.


Like Jestah said...personal preference.