This is an article discussion thread for discussing the SitePoint article, “Debate - WYSIWYG: a Web Designer’s Dream”
I agree with most of your article… however your statemen the WYSISYGs create cleaner code is false… programs such as dreamweaver create messy unneccessary code to do simple things.
To put it simply: hand coding is finicky. When you’re hand coding, it’s all too easy to forget to hit “tab” – when you arrive at the end of your code, you discover that every single line is out of whack! You can easily avoid these kinds of hand coding misadventures with the help of a good WYSIWYG editor.
You should have used a better opening statement to win over this debate. Whichever lines you forgot to indent, highlight them all and push tab - it’ll indent them all. If you accidently have an extra indent for a large portion, highlight the lines and push shift-tab. Most editors do this (excluding notepad).
Besides, indents don’t even mean a scratch in HTML.
In neither of the two articles I see another possible option mentioned: coding in an WYSIWYG editor, and optimizing the HTML documents by hand. Both this and the opposition’s article address the situation as if there is one good and one bad. But wouldn’t you say the two are combinable?
3 year old article, guys…
And…how much has changed on this issue since then, you wonder?
Nothing, they still produce rubbish code, which you have to go back and clean up. A lot of people don’t bother though.
Speed should not be an issue, if you actually learn how to type correctly it is faster than WSIWYG editors.