On Hand Coding HTML/CSS and the Brevity of Life

At certain times, people whom I admire and respect share foolish and misguided opinions. Most of the time, I let it slide; for what is more human than folly? However, ever so often I feel a need to voice disagreement. As you may have guessed, O soothsaying reader, is one of them. The opinion is:

WYSIWYG text editors are for amatures. Real men hand code their web pages.

Paul Scriven's post brought this topic up. Paul, who is no less than the CEO of 9rules, Inc argues (correctly) that you will never be a competent builder of webpages if you depend on a WYSIWYG editor. This fact is undeniable.

Often I am faced with the task of rennovating websites that had been built by clients who never bothered to understand the difference between <div>, <span>,<h1>,<p>, [ect.] before they busted out GoLive and declared "Who needs to know HTML?!". However, the result is never what they intend.

They thought they could set a few font tags, build a few tables, and they'd have a clean site. Instead, what they got was chaos: Angels were set ablaze everytime someone with a non-IE browser accessed their company's website; the air was saturated with gurgling squeels of pigs being slaughtered! Good men cried out for their mothers in agony as 56k modems attempted to download 5 megs of solid text against solid color background gifs. My brothers and sisters: if I were to tell you of the sorts of markup I'd seen, you'd never believe me -- for it is too horrible and your virgin minds wouldn't want to believe.

That said, however, I'm writing this on a WYSIWYG editor. And I see no problem with that. Fools might think they can build three column fluid layouts using Dreamweaver's "tables mode"; but I suggest the bigger fool is the web designer who insists upon hard coding every link, everyline of an unordered list, every paragraph, every header, and every other page element that can be perfectly (and indeed with a far less percentage of tags left open, or inconsitancy) taken care of by a WYSIWYG editor.

I just pressed return and -- like magic -- my editor inserted new paragraph tags. Check this page's markup (and realize I am too busy to deal with the left-sidebar in IE issue -- that was human error on my part, btw), and you will note golden, beautiful, simple, and zenlike markup of the gods. If the suggestion is that I should take satisifaction in hard coding p tags, than all I can say is that I -- at the very least -- aspire to a normal sex life.

On a final, and by far most significant note, don't forget history. In all industries, in all ages, in all realms of expertise, it is wise to forsee what functions and skills carry the most risk of one day being replaced by more efficent and powerful machines. Be my guest and deceive yourself into thinking our art is the careful laying of P tags. I'll be keeping myself busy with figuring out how I can keep myself most relevent, and -- to some extent -- what repetitive tasks I can assign our magic thinking machines (a.k.a. computers). It just seems obvious to assume that if we can trust computing our credit rating to computers, we can god damn well trust them to lay a f#cking paragraph tag.