I'm
going to step on my soapbox; something I don't do that often. I
recently had a web developer make a comment to me about how they view
content creation and design. Loosely quoted: "I don't use
tools like FrontPage. I prefer to do all my HTML by hand in a text
editor."
The funny thing is, I had the same philosophy about six years ago.
However, I realized at some point that this "philosophy" is not only a
little arrogant, but also a huge waste of time. I do believe that you
need a very good knowledge of HTML, CSS, javascript, SQL, usability
concepts, and probably several different scripting languages to be a
good, professional web developer. However, I don't believe that you have
to write all the code by hand to prove your knowledge.
In the end, you're only proving your knowledge to yourself. The
end-user doesn't know that you hand-code and more importantly, they
don't care. They are only interested in the end-product. The
web editing software packages today and very powerful, timesaving tools
that allow you to create a web framework in a matter of minutes.
Why waste your time typing tedious <TR><TD></TD></TR> for every column
of a table, when you can do it with one click and drag of the mouse?
Furthermore, any decent editing package today gives you the ability to
view the html in-line to allow you to make subtle changes to your code
if necessary.
Even free software packages are often better alternatives to editing
everything via a text-editor. So instead of spending your time typing
out all the code, spend your time doing research on usability and good
design techniques. I guarantee that it will lead to a much better
website than being concerned about showing off your skills, or that the
HTML is not "clean".
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