Freshly Squeezed Reviews
by Frank Petrie December 2004
The W3C, WSIWYG and Hand-Coding
Today, I thought that I would write a sister piece to my friend Daniel East's
recent article <> on the plethora of browsers that are out there for end users
to choose from. Dan wrote his piece from the view of the end user but I'd like
to view the issue from the flip side, from that of the web designer or
webmaster.
The W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the body that oversees the standards that
are used on the web. Or at least they try to. You see, browser coders
occasionally take short cuts or, like in any profession, some are just plain
lazy or lousy. As a result, the standards that The W3C recommends all browsers
follow are either totally ignored or partially so. It ends up being like all the
various plug formats in the 90's before the industry pretty much settled on USB
and FireWire.
That's why when you go to the same site but in different browsers, you can can
end up with two wildly different experiences. And it drives web designers
insane. In fact, there is a grassroots movement quietly building among these
designers to code strictly to W3C standards and place the responsibility of
compliance squarely on the shoulders of the browser authors.
Hand-Coding
Old school. Count me in. It takes longer but you learn a lot more about how
things work 'under the hood.' In fact, even if you use a WYSIWYG web coder, when
you troubleshoot your design, you have to result to hand-coding. So either way
you go, you're going to have to learn what makes a site tick.
In the early days, people used to code their sites using ordinary word
processors. In fact, if you really know your stuff, you could code a whole site
using just TextEdit. But the hand-coder of choice is BBEdit from Bare Bones
Software. It comes with built-in task bars that can be customized in order to
save time by automating some of your repetitive tasks.
WYSIWYG
New school. Has its own learning curve but, as the acronym implies, What You See
Is What You Get. The advantages here are obvious - you immediately know what
your output looks like, which can save you a lot of time. You can add links,
drag-n-drop graphics and all manner of stuff in a single pane, also a bonus.
The two most popular tools of choice here are Dreamweaver and Adobe Go Live!. In
fact, BBEdit has been set up to work hand-in-hand with Dreamweaver if you so
choose. They're expensive but worth the price if you crank out sites for a
living.
WSIWYG vs. Hand-Coding
As I have said already, WYSIWYG is great for laying out your site in a timely
manner, but you're still have to roll up your sleeves and do a bit of
hand-coding when it's time to troubleshoot. A lot of web designers have taken to
using WYSIWYGs for the layout and roughing in and hand-coding for tightening
things up.
The goal of every web designer is to keep their code to a minimum, as
streamlined as possible. But each piece of software leaves you with varying
results. I found a great example in an older HTML coding how-to book. A
hand-coder was able to check part of a browser's capabilities with only eight
lines of code. One WYSIWYG took one and a half pages to accomplish the same task
while the other took even more.
Four years ago, that would have taxed your browser. Today, because of increasing
speeds, you really don't notice it. But that only encourages sloppy coding,
unfortunately. And makes for a really big problem for web designers.
In OS X, you'll note that a lot of the code is XML (eXtensible Markup Language).
This will eventually replace HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It's much more
efficient, but it is rigid. You can't get off easy with sloppy coding, either
from the web designer or the browser author. We're also starting to see
regularly CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The advantage to these is that a web
designer, for example, could change the font face on every single page of a
corporate website
by changing the font-style assignation just on the CSS page. Every page on the
site would see that the style has been changed and would accommodate
accordingly, even if the site numbered in the hundreds of pages. Very efficient.
Unfortunately ...
Each browser seems to have its own tick. Be that it doesn't work well with
JavaScripts or doesn't work with the latest version of CSS. Plus you can
customize your personal settings. So you can see, the web designer is fighting
an uphill battle. That's why the grassroots movement of 'Damn the Browser' is
getting a strong foothold. To code a page to accommodate each and every
browser's nuances is for all purposes, impossible.
So, when you do choose your modern browser, I beg you as a web designer, try to
pick one that adheres to as many of the rules as is possible.
And most of those are free.
©2004 Frank Petrie, Freelance writer, Macsimum News contributor, SJAUG
eCommunicator, Curmudgeon
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