25 Dec
2008
25 Dec
'08
12:37 a.m.
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Hand-coding isn't just a good idea for learning
HTML, it really causes people
to make leaner documents. People forget that HTML is, as its acronym implies,
a markup language. When people use a page designer, they tend to forget that.
Using "page designer" software is one of the glaringly obvious ways to
make your page scream "CACK-HANDED AMATEUR!" at the reader. The amount
of bloat and cruft and Just Plain Wrong markup that they introduce makes
the resulting pages slow to load, slow to render and indeed in some
cases just not render at all.
No-one - I repeat, *no-one* - uses page designer-type software for
serious, professional websites. Neither do they tend to use hand-coded
static HTML pages, except on very, very small sites that are never
expected to change.
More typically, you'd design a page template, perhaps using Lorem Ipsum
instead of "real" content but basically resembling the finished page.
Then the website backend will replace marked blocks of text with the
real content, pulled from a database. This ensures that the look and
feel of the site is consistent across all the pages, and navigation can
be built automagically by the backend.
Since it's generally simpler to do this for all but the most trivial
sites, I don't think I've written a static HTML page intended for
production use in years.
Gordon