Preserved Topic: I love my job. (noise, venting)

I'm finishing up my last freelance project before falling completely into the black hole of permanent employment, and I'm working on a site, which must remain nameless, which is possibly the worst-coded thing I've ever seen that still works. There are mailto forms that use <form action="mailto:blah@blah.com"> as their "CGI"... there are pages made with PageMill, pages made with Dreamweaver, and pages made with FrontPage (an old version, judging by the manic-schizophrenic code)... there are bizarre sequences of <tr></tr> tags, going on for half a page... there are "innovative" solutions to traditional design problems, which inevitably create more problems than they solve... it's gotten to the point where I honestly don't know what the original "designer" was thinking. And, Christ Almighty, the design company left copyright notices as comments on some of the pages. It's like leaving an apology note at the site of an embassy bombing.

The site was designed by the sole web guy at a traditional print-ad agency. Probably that's the problem. He said "I hit these pretty buttons in this WSYWIG interface, and graphics happen" and they said "great, implement this design we did in Quark!" And he said "thank you for thousands of dollars. I love getting paid lots of money to make web pages so badly coded they should be considered historical curiosities!"

Why do I love this? Because it means even if Dreamweaver is the "standard" (if you can call gratuitous nested font tags a standard), there's still a need for real coders, with real skills, who can really look at real HTML and make code that doesn't suck ass. You know that snotty friend of yours who can't watch foreign films dubbed, he always needs the subtitled version? That's me and hand-coding. Dreamweaver sucks the same way dubbing sucks: 90% of Americans don't give a shit. So what? Every page of this site that's filled with giant blocks of nonbreaking spaces makes me more glad that I know what the hell I'm doing, and all the more sad about everyone who doesn't.

This design company was thinking of hiring me at one point... they should have, but it might have been too late for me to fix their web reputation. I've seen some of their former web clients advertising for freelancers, with the specific stipulation "no bids from agencies or design houses." That's bitterness, folks... crash and burn.

<edit> dear mods: this started as a complaint about bad code and bad graphical editors. Move it to Outpatient Counseling if you feel it's better off there. </edit>

[This message has been edited by Perfect Thunder (edited 01-28-2002).]

quote:

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Dreamweaver sucks the same way dubbing sucks: 90% of Americans don't give a shit.

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I couldn't agree more! Now some people, Ducati in particular, can use Dreamweaver very well. I would rather have total control over what is going on.

There is a girl that I work with that freelances and uses Dreamweaver. Her sites suck! Then again, when it comes to her, there is a fine line between gaudiness and creativity.

Sounds like you have your work cut out for you on this one if you do help them with there design.

Long Live HTML Beauty!

Later,
C:\


~Binary is best~

i discovered dreamweaver code when i checked the code on a friend's site to see what she had done that created a bottom scroll bar even at full screen!! that's when i decided her site would be good for refreshing my html skills!
the dw code works, but it's ugly.




[This message has been edited by velvetrose (edited 01-28-2002).]

Dreamweaver has nice aspects. I made a website for a soccer organization and they wanted me to put the schedule on the internet. So I Went into dreamweaver, made a Huge A$$ table (like 15 colums by 30 rows) then saved it as an html, closed dreamweaver and opened it in notepad and edited it from there. I don't want to waste time writing out all those <table><tr><td>
Ah Well

Marf

quote:

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What's Your ID?

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I'm with you, Marf -- data entry in big tables is one thing that I do use Dreamweaver for. But I still use HomeSite's table wizard to lay them out if they're simple, or I do it by hand if they're not.

And velvetrose, this site has the exact same thing. Every main page table is set to 105% width. I didn't even bother fixing it. Once I saw the code, I thought "okay, MacDougall, time to make the listed edits and get the hell out."

I'm not an enemy of Dreamweaver specifically, although I'm an enemy of the laziness and bad design/coding it inspired. (And I'm an enemy of its near-complete inability to create full-featured stylesheets, but if you know about the powers of CSS, you're probably not using Dreamweaver at all.) If people learned to hand-code first, they'd at least know how to fix Dreamweaver's wrongs. I understand that Dreamweaver and its competitors fill a need -- I just wish that people would realize that the programs are not necessarily friendly to your code.

Hmm... here's a print parallel. Quark XPress lets you hit a convenient "B" button to bold your text. If you do that, though, you perform a crappy software transformation on the letterforms. Hence, the pros have learned to manually change the font from the book version to the bold version. Dreamweaver needs a similar learning curve, but alas, the web market is a bit too immature for that sort of expertise to have risen to the top... everyone says "hey, these people offer 'integrated web services,' let's get some!"

You know how I got my new job? They had a page where the tables were breaking, clipping off the edges of some of their paragraphs. I went into the code and found a couple of unclosed <td> tags. They'd never touched the HTML themselves -- the entire site was pure Dreamweaver. Now, this was the first time I'd seen Dreamweaver actually commit honest-to-God syntax errors, but now I've seen it, and I'm adding it to my listing of DW flaws.

Perfect Thunder: Well as annoying (and pervasive) as DW is you know there is always something worse out there - my personal pet hate is Word 2000. I've now had a number of people asking me to help with their pages exported from WORD2K and the simple answer is no I can't help!!

Emps

I know exactly what you mean, Emp. The site I'm working on has one (thankfully only one) page exported from Word2K, and it's absolutely bizarre. It saves all the proprietary Word file format stuff as XML, so you get these XML markings in the file that are just strings of numbers... it generates CSS for each text style saved in the document... and THEN it generates old-school table-based font-tag-heavy HTML. It's the weirdest code I've ever seen.

PT: Its is bad but I understand why its there - the thing that gets me is people who:

1. Think the Word2k is a HTML editor.

2. Don't have a clue what they are doing.

Its this that leads to those awful pages - its easy enough to clean up the code but people just want to get it out there as HTML without bothering to address any of the issues. I think MS have to shoulder some of the blame too as Word 97 does a very neat job of exporting Word files as HTML and sometimes you do need a large quantity of text converting in that way. Trying to troubleshoot the code in a version with all the 'round-tripping' code in is just impossible (and I've tried).

Well that is my major gripe (I've plenty of little ones too to keep me happy!!).

For anyone faced with someone handing a page and expecting you to do something with it you can use HTMLTidy:
www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/#word2000

or instal the Office 2000 HTML Filter 2.0:
http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/Msohtmf2.aspx

Emps


Beware the foreparts of a woman, the hindparts of a mule, and all sides of a priest - English proverb

marf - try HTML Beauty @ http://www.max.co.yu/htmlbeauty/

I've had a lot of experience with bad code too. One really nice feature of Dreamweaver is the BBEdit integration (on Mac, on PC it's Homesite integration?). You can have the document open in both programs and it even maintains the selection between programs. So when you have to fix some horribly unbalanced illegal table markup, you can use dreamweaver to figure out which <td> corresponds to which </td> by selecting it in Dreamweaver, then switching over to the editor.

It is sad what Dreamweaver allows people to do in terms of bad coding. But compared to GoLive or even worse, FrontPage, it is a worthy tool. I'm surprised you are dissatisfied with Dreamweaver's CSS, because I think it's a really great way to get your feet wet without having to learn CSS from scratch.

After working professionally for 3 years there is one thing I've come to realize about web design. There is no ideal. No matter how cleanly I implement a design, it seems there is always room for improvement. The right compromise between flexibility, ease of maintenance, and graphic design is a tough balance to achieve.

For the next revision of my site I am planning on implementing a PHP template system that will completely separate content from presentation. Creating consistency for my 30+ sub-sites within the domain, and more importantly keeping it all maintainable with a minimum of fuss.

I know there are content management systems by the dozen out there, but I hate the thought of spending 40 hours learning some software only to find out that it's design fundamentally limits some goal I'm trying to achieve.



-jiblet

Here's the root of my dissatisfaction with Dreamweaver's CSS -- I created a very stylesheet-heavy site for a client, and I sent him the HTML and the CSS together. The HTML referred to the CSS using a commented @import statement, which is a standard practice (correct me if I'm wrong). I didn't use <link rel="stylesheet"...> because I wanted the ability to add spot styles to individual documents, while preserving the imported CSS file.

Anyway, the client opened the HTML file in Dreamweaver, and got a completely unstyled document. I tried the same thing, using Dreamweaver 4, with the same result. Dreamweaver just didn't understand @import, or the comment tags fooled it, or something. Maybe I'm just too hard on Dreamweaver... I understand the next version is supposed to have greatly enhanced next-wave coding support (CSS, XHTML, XML, et cetera.)

I do like the ability to select an element in Dreamweaver's design/code view and see the relevant code immediately highlighted. That's another thing I sometimes use Dreamweaver for -- if I'm handed a document that I didn't code, I'll often open Dreamweaver and give it a once-over that way. <edit> In HomeSite, however, if all you want to do is find the closing tag of a <td>, you can right-click the <td> and choose "select tag" from the context menu. That'll select the entire contents of the <td> tag. </edit>

I guess I'll stress again that I don't dislike Dreamweaver qua Dreamweaver: I dislike its overall consequences for web design (i.e. the growing and misguided perception that web designers don't have to know any code), and I dislike the code it produces if not strictly controlled. Okay, and I also dislike its Byzantine rollover script. Does anyone even understand that thing?

Okay, I've finished my own project, and the clients have agreed that their old code was iffy, so I'm going to post a link. Please view the source and try to tell me how, even in the least competent of hands, Dreamweaver could have come up with such direful code. I know it was Dreamweaver... this guy didn't know how to hand-code.

http://www.investorsbank.com/busbank/cash.html



[This message has been edited by Perfect Thunder (edited 01-31-2002).]

looks like dreamweaver to me.. all the way to the - table width="105%" - which creates the forever scrollbar at the bottom of the page

Ew, yeah. I don't use that DW rollover script, and when it comes to stylesheets, I edit them in DW, but I use PHP to load extra stylesheets depending on the browser.

It's true that if you don't know what code you are trying to produce, then DW will lead you astray. But look at it this way, people who don't know how to hand code wouldn't be able to create any web page without it, so for them it IS an improvement. I guess it's sad when these people are getting paid like professionals, but I think that is a legacy of the dot-com bubble. Finding work for me hasn't gotten any harder over the last 18 months. In fact, it's gotten easier, because IT managers are much more receptive to people who understand things like deadlines and maintainability.

Let's face it, web design is a such a mish-mash of un-standardized technologies, that there isn't really hope of a WYSIWIG editor becoming robust enough to generate ideal code any time soon. Right now Dreamweaver serves me well, but only because i know it's limitations.



-jiblet

I have only read some of dream weaver CSS but the most salient difference between tables and CSS is that CSS requires PrePlanning.. I have had to "think ahead" in CSS more than in even the most complex tables..as CSS has 10 ways of doing the same thing but not even 9.5 of those ways may be worthy or correct to use..Some other points 1) a machine works top down..a to b to c..when I get to c, I may realize at point H I have to go back and insert something ..after A, before B... while dreamweaver or any machine will try to "fix" at that point H ... 2) rather than go to p.x and change the codes a bit to include a change, a machine will make another p.y.. identical to p.x..but including something common to both but not stipulated in p.x at its inception.. THESE machine techniques have "worked" somewhat and only bloated the code in table html but CSS is sensitive to "scrambling" and the straight line approach: "insert this here, insert that there" coding in CSS will give what it gets.. scrambled web pages.. I hope this makes sense because..UNLESS.. machines start using standard "templates" I doubt machines are going to be able to ever do CSS without mangling it.. I may be wrong..but that is my take on it..

Well, admittedly I only use CSS for font information, not layout, so I can't comment on DW's higher level CSS support.

Still, I think editors will come around at about the same speed as browsers come around. Don't underestimate the ability of a WYSIWIG program to create good code, it's just a matter of defining and supporting standards stringently enough that they can be coded unambiguously. This takes a while for something as complex as page layout in pixel-based variable resolution environments.

-jiblet

Let's face it. The average person doesn't care how or why the TV works. What they care about is if they can watch Friends. The same thing applies to web design. The average person doesn't care whether the site they are visiting was created by hand or through a bloated editor. Applications such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage are going to be around for a while because it gives those unwilling to learn HTML and CSS the ability to create a website. Not everyone wants to learn how to create the site for themselves. Some people like being able to click an icon on there desktop and have there browser open up. They don't want to know why, thats boring, they want to surf the net, thats fun.

Besides, why are you so critical of Dreamweaver's faults? If Dreamweaver created perfect code in all aspects of design, you wouldn't have a job. Be greatful the program is limited and that because of its limitations you can make money.

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cheers.jay

Justah..web pages are big projects.. there is the coding, the content to write, organize and layout, there are graphics to create.. There are so many parts, Yes I would love a WSYWIG to work really well so I didn't have to create the paper before I can do the art..I have to make paper, which is a mechanical process in many ways, time consuming and after a while very repetitive.. I don''t thinks a good web page maker is going to put anyone out of business as the truly creative, the artist, writers, layout designers would have more time to create that part of the page...so my criticism is disappointment.. I really wish an off the shelf editor could free me from writing endless divs or tables..so I could spend more time on graphics and writing.. the fun parts..but I don't think it will happen..

Want to know a secret? Part of my distaste for WYSIWYG editors is my fear that within a few years, they'll make my hard-won hand-coding abilities utterly irrelevant, and then I'll join the ranks of coopers, wainwrights, fullers, paste-up artists, telegraph operators, and stagecoach drivers.

That's a fear that I'll never mention to a client.

O ... I hope so!! I could spend all those hours creating animations.. graphics, writing really clever content..and developing interactive things and studying programming.. you will not be out of a job..you will just have better , more meticulously crafted content.. Content sells, not coding.. artists will never be out of work on the web..what sells? Content Content Content..not coding..the only difference between good and bad coding is people notice bad coding.. good coding is not what makes a great page..so I am standing in line to buy the first wysiwyg that meets even my minimum standard of good coding..

Whoo...I saw my name! heh.. Thank you C:\ for kind words..

I use Dreamweaver, I use it a lot... so what...Why I use it? Well lets see here...instead of typing all that code by hand, I simply draw my page in Photohop, slice it up in ImageReady save it for the web and lookine lookie... I have a table made up so next, I open my lovely DW, click on html file and bamm!! its all there... next thing, I click on a code tab and clean it up...

Oh you want to insert keyword tag? Look over there...there is a nice Keyword icon.. just click on it and put your stuff in there....Common.. is it really that bad?????

What is so bad about it? That I don't spend hours typing this by hand? That's nuts! Time is money...

I deeply agree with Jestah...people don't care how it's build ( some of them might) but most of them they just want it to look good, work... users don't surf to check every pages code...

Now.. trash me...I will keep using it anyways because I like it.. it makes it easier...that's why it was developed...Its a great learning tool, and from just looking at the code, I learned a lot about HTML when I first got into building sites back in February of last year. Back then, I had no clue what table tag was. I am no expert by no means, but I am learning and DW simply works the best for some people to learn...

:: Max ::

[This message has been edited by Ducati (edited 02-11-2002).]

Agreed Ducati. DW 4.0 makes you learn a lot, especially if you work with design view and code view togeather. I use hand coding only when absolutely necessary. As you said time is money and DW saves MONEY. For me Fireworks works better than photoshop cuz i am not a good designer.

Ranjan
www.comp-act.ws
ranjan@comp-act.ws

I guess this is just a web-code version of the Photoshop filters vs. hand-drawing argument. And most of the same points apply to each side, so I'll just leave it at this.