The positive and negative of wysiwyg

[willyable]

IF wysiwyg is so fantastic then why don't everyone use? I mean I have been using it for a long time now because I'm not really website building savvy but wysiwyg has made my life so much more easier when it comes to building a site. why use or do anything else?

 

[yvonnewilcox]

Diehard Web Programmers

Some of the Diehard Web Programmers would frown on the wysiwyg programs. They feel like they are not being creative unless they are coding their hearts out. I guess old habits are hard to break.

 

[JustAMan]

I know this topic is old, but its something im adamant about!!

WYSIWYG editors are useless for serious coding!!!

Firstly they often include the full filepath to media like images, videos etc... eG file:\\C\My docs\blah\image.png and that obviously doesnt work when uploaded to the net, secondly they fill your page with useless code that you really dont need or want, it makes the page load time longer and can cause problems with older/newer browser and standards compliance.

Thats my third point! Most WYSIWYG arent standards compliant, what does that mean? Well browsers like IE (rubbish) arent standards compliant, but browsers like firefox (excellent) ARE compliant (mostly) so if you wrote non-compliant code with a WYSIWYG (or without one) you risk bugs on the decent browsers and further display issues.

They also dont allow for advanced features, its hard to edit Javascript, CSS etc... its impossible to comment or structure the code that is chucked out and i find it taks me longer to use a WYSIWYG than using my code editor. I do however have two free WYSIWYG's for positioning elements, i can see instantly onscreen when i move something and get it to the right point, and either copy the co-ords/values or convert them to percentages to keep it all nice and browser friendly and insert it into my code.

Ive tried Frontpage and i can say its the most user friendly, but its also the most useless when it comes to the code!

If you want to make websites learn HTML, its easy, fun and you'll develop yourself in the process

Now lets perk this forum up! Its too quiet!

 

[sum1]

Yep to be short, WYSIWYG is really WYSIWYMG. My meaning? It's not what you see is what you get, it's actually what you see is what you might get. WYSIWYG is crap as the above post said it's not standards compliant for the most part and so by using it you're making your life easier but anyone who doesn't use IE's life a damn site harder, not to mention the poor people who have to try to make their browsers standards compliant annndd Microsoft dicked up code compliant.

 

[JustAMan]

Haha that post made me laugh

Try convincing teachers at a college that you know better than them though... it want easy! (but to be honest the cleaner knew more than those ICT teachers....One didnt even know what a network cable was... we got her fired Thank god i can do things MY way now!)

Sum1, youll be glad to know im going to give opera a try Have IE, FF, Google Chrome and now Opera lol Not to mention various derivatives like my own secret browser based on IE and GhostZilla!

Out of interest how many people here are "techies" as they say?

As i said i develop websites and im also fairly good with networks and computers B)

 

[sum1]

Haha that post made me laugh

Try convincing teachers at a college that you know better than them though... it want easy! (but to be honest the cleaner knew more than those ICT teachers....One didnt even know what a network cable was... we got her fired Thank god i can do things MY way now!)

Lol, my ict teacher had a doctorate... in botany.


I'm kinda theatre tech, as well as just having a general interest, 2 out of my three computers are running Mandriva (i used to use Fedora, but came in form that bleeding edge)

 

[JustAMan]

Ah cool, i keep telling myself to use linux (i know were going off topic here a bit but no-one else is using the thread!) i tried mandriva, DSL and ubuntu. Mandriva was nice, but i got stumped when it came to installing and i had to use the console and at the time i wasnt as techie as i am now. I will try it again one day im sure. I jsut need another computer, i only have my laptop at the moment and i cant afford to replace it yet!

Ive dual booted before but id rather seperate the systems. One day! I know id rather have Mandriva back than vista :O

Talking of new software im not convinced on Opera Even though i beleive its the most standards compliant browser around these days?

 

[OzzyD]

I think in the case of web-browser programming, it's WYCIWYGP, or What You Code Is What You Get Pedantically

In such things as Visual Studio, and yes I agree, it does suck, it's WYPOSIWYG... What You Put On Screen Is What You Get

 

[rpUral]

You have to look at the html produced by a WYSIWYG web editor to understand why programmers hate them so much. The generated html is so convoluted and filled with needless things for even the simplest of pages, and if you want to go in and do a "simple" tweak of the page, it can take forever and be nearly impossible.

If you look at the html of some of the pages you visit, you can immediately see that they've been hand-coded or generated, because you won't really be able to read the generated ones.

For Windows, Notepad is still, by far, the best html editor. Of course,... I don't use Windows.

 

[Agent Green]

WYSIWYG when mixed with hand coding can be a powerful combination.

Dreamweaver is great for editing CSS. It make style sheets very visible and instantly shows you the results of editing them. While I would not code an entire website in Dreamweaver I often use it to generate style sheets. When I have the CSS to my liking there I next run it through Flumpcakes (the best CSS cleaning and optimization tool I have ever used; read about what it does here) to make it pretty. Finally I touch it up by hand.