providing graphic design, branding, photography and marketing expertise to denver and the world
Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
Hand-Crafted HTML
I spent the better part of this afternoon doing web production on a medium-sized site due to go live in a few weeks, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about how I like to work.
Now, there are many decent, hard-working web page composition programs out there, most notably Dreamweaver; and I have used them extensively...in the past. But I've come to the conculsion that for 90 percent of all HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, and other acronymed web development work, I prefer to code by hand.
Old School!
Why? Well, once you learn the syntax, it's quicker. Trust me! And it allows you to create fast, clean code, without many of the pitfalls and extraneous bits that GUI-based programs like Dreamweaver can place into your pages without your knowledge. Anyone who has ever waded through Microsoft FrontPage-created webpage code will know what I am talking about.
Pretty much any text editor will do--even Microsoft Word, in a pinch--but I prefer BareBones Software's BBEdit. It's long been the de-facto standard in programming text editors, especially for web code writers. Why? Well, it's no-frills, function-specific approach to its interface is a big selling point.
And it is very user-friendly.
Case-in-point: it color-codes your code so you know if you are looking at an image source element, or a formatting element, or actual content, for example. Their motto: "It doesn't suck", says it all.
Yes, yes, Dreamweaver has a "code view" mode, so you can see the code as you mess about in GUI mode, but BBEdit also has a Preview mode, which allows you to see things as the browser will display them, so that arguement is a wash.
It comes down to this:
If so, you will prefer to code by hand. If not, you will probably prefer something like Dreamweaver.
- did you grow up in the age of learning BASIC in school?
- Were you amazed when you found out that you could upgrade from a VIC-20 to a Commodore 64 and get all that extra processing power?
- Did you make ASCII art with your dot-matrix printer?
Not that I'm judging you.
So if you really want to understand what this web thing is all about, look at some of your favorite webpages using "View Source", borrow a copy of O'Reilly's HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, and learn something new! Trust me, you'll love it!
posted at 9:15 PM Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Leave your comments here: 0 comments
Archived Posts:
09.02
10.02
11.02
12.02
01.03
02.03
03.03
04.03
05.03
06.03
11.04
11.05
12.05
01.06
02.06
03.06
04.06
05.06
06.06
07.06
08.06
09.06
10.06
11.06
12.06
01.07
02.07
03.07
04.07
05.07
06.07
07.07
08.07
09.07
10.07
11.07
12.07
01.08
02.08
03.08
04.08
