Q: By
writing my Web pages in a basic text editor (Microsoft Wordpad), am I (a) a
cool webmonkey who has more control over his HTML, or (b) a super-geek
who has too much time on his hands and enjoys typing
< > and </> for hours on end? If
I used a WYSIWYG editor once (maybe just to test colors?) would I be shunned
forever by all Web designers? Please help, O wise webmonkeys!
- Mike
A: Mike,
Your question reminds me, oddly enough, of a magazine
illustration from the 1950s that predicted the use of rubber
furniture by the year 2000. It depicted a shiny PVC future in
which sofas and bookcases could simply be hosed off when
they got dirty.
I guess the artist never considered what would happen when
the homeowner-of-the-future turned her hose on the books in
her new rubber bookshelf. Or that little future-Billy might leave
his copy of Wired lying on the rubber coffee table. It was a
foolish idea because it ignored the messy and imperfect way
people actually use living rooms.
Using a WYSIWYG editor for HTML is like living in a rubber room.
Now, there are a lot of people who insist with pride that they'll
never use anything but Wordpad or SimpleText to code their
HTML. Personally, I think a text editor is a pretty silly thing to
be macho about, and the Webmonkeys have been known to use WYSIWYG editors for certain tasks. But there are several other, sound reasons to
avoid WYSIWYG editors. It's for you to decide whether the
(substantial) benefits of HTML editors like Adobe GoLive
or Macromedia Dreamweaver
are worth the drawbacks. But it would be
irresponsible of me not to make the case against them.
WYSIWYG, as most of you know, stands for "what you see is
what you get." And WYSIWYG HTML editors let you design Web
pages without typing any HTML tags. Aimed at the
desktop-publishing audience, these editors present the user
with familiar page-layout commands, and then translate them
into HTML. So when you press return or click on the indent
button, the editor adds HTML tags to your document that
mimic a paragraph break or indentation.
Trouble is, not only do HTML tags not correlate perfectly with
page-layout commands, but WYS in one browser is often different from WYG
in another. And no matter how sophisticated the
editor, it still has to make choices and compromises as it tries to
translate your command into acceptable HTML.
So, for example, pressing return twice in Netscape
Composer
generates two <br> tags, but Dreamweaver gives you
<p> </p>.
If you decide to use an editor, you'll want to
familiarize yourself with its idiosyncracies, and make sure you
know how and when to go into the HTML code and clean up after them.
You'll also have to contend with the assortment of proprietary
tags some of the programs sneak into your documents for their own
nefarious purposes. PageMill, for example, adds a
NATURALSIZEFLAG parameter to <IMG> tags. This shouldn't break
browsers, but it sure is ugly. (If you want to see more
PageMill-generated HTML, just search for NATURALSIZEFLAG in
your favorite search engine.)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, editors can only know
about HTML as it existed when they were released. To take
advantage of any HTML not known to the editor, you'll have to
insert it by hand (or wait for the next version of the editor).
Even then, the editor may remove tags it doesn't understand unless you
enclose them within special additional tags, such as PageMill's <!--NOEDIT-->. Ironically, the
best feature of most WYSIWYG editors is that they allow you
to edit your HTML directly in a text editor.
Recent WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver and GoLive have come a long
way from the days of PageMill, and as Web markup languages become
increasingly advanced, it's likely that
many of my complaints will become outdated. For now, however, I still
prefer a full-featured text editor such as BBEdit
(for Macintosh) or Emacs (for Windows or Unix) for most of my HTML
needs. These
programs have truly helpful features, such as syntax coloring
(see your <img> tags in green, and your <a href>s in red) and
powerful search and replace capabilities. Several text editors
have HTML extensions that can help stave off
repetitive-stress injuries to your wrists (although I never seem
to use them).
WYSIWYG editors are perfect for someone like mattmarg's
grandmother, who just wants to make a few simple Web pages
and can't be bothered to learn HTML. And they can also
be useful for experienced HTML coders who want to save
keystrokes and - most importantly - who know the editor's
limitations and flaws, and how to clean them up. Overall,
however, use of such editors can retard the learning process,
discourage innovation, and corrupt code. It may even give
you hairy palms. And you can't wash that off with a hose.
