Dreamweaver - Dreamweaver vs. hand-coding

Author

Dreamweaver vs. hand-coding

T. Dorsey Harrington

2005-12-30, 6:29 pm

I tried searching this newsgroup for opinions on this topic, and finally
decided to just post the question. I'm a big DW fan, having used it (and
other) WYSIWYG editors for years, but recently I've gotten arguments that
hand-coding by "those who know what they're doing" is a superior method and
that DW just "gets in the way". I have many, many arguments on the DW side,
and haven't yet heard any cogent arguments against it.

The site I'm working on expects 1 million daily hits, and that's the main
argument being used against DW, although (again) there are no explicit
arguments, just opinion. As background, the site is fully LAMP-based, using
Red Hat, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Further background is that those holding
the anti-DW opinions are all graphic artists who now build web sites, while
I'm a software engineer who has successfully redirected my 20+ years
experience to web technologies.

If I'm wrong, I'd really like to know why, but I need good reasons. I'm
looking for arguments such as excessive bandwidth requirements (page size),
that certain web functionality (AJAX?) would be lost, or that maintenance is
enhanced via hand-coding. So far, I can't even play devil's advocate to my
position because I just don't see any problems and lots of advantages to DW.

Thanks for your help,
Dorsey

Michael Vilain

2005-12-30, 10:24 pm

In article <tSgtf.78$Z74.46@trndny06>,
"T. Dorsey Harrington" <dorseyharrington@verizon.net> wrote:

> I tried searching this newsgroup for opinions on this topic, and finally
> decided to just post the question. I'm a big DW fan, having used it (and
> other) WYSIWYG editors for years, but recently I've gotten arguments that
> hand-coding by "those who know what they're doing" is a superior method and
> that DW just "gets in the way". I have many, many arguments on the DW side,
> and haven't yet heard any cogent arguments against it.
>
> The site I'm working on expects 1 million daily hits, and that's the main
> argument being used against DW, although (again) there are no explicit
> arguments, just opinion. As background, the site is fully LAMP-based, using
> Red Hat, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Further background is that those holding
> the anti-DW opinions are all graphic artists who now build web sites, while
> I'm a software engineer who has successfully redirected my 20+ years
> experience to web technologies.
>
> If I'm wrong, I'd really like to know why, but I need good reasons. I'm
> looking for arguments such as excessive bandwidth requirements (page size),
> that certain web functionality (AJAX?) would be lost, or that maintenance is
> enhanced via hand-coding. So far, I can't even play devil's advocate to my
> position because I just don't see any problems and lots of advantages to DW.
>
> Thanks for your help,
> Dorsey

I'm struggling with this dilemma right now. The non-profit web site I
coded in php+MySQL+Apache has been critized as "plain". My counter to
this is that I'm not an artist or web designer but a programmer/sys
admin doing a web application. It's all HTML+CSS coded by hand rather
than using any sort of GUI tool. I tried doing a page using GoLive and
the code was all tables and very ugly. I'll probably refactor the site
using some sort of template engine so that layout tools like DW or
GoLive can be used to pour in content.

Your concerns about using DW vs. hand coding are, to me, more about site
design than anything else. Instead of very pretty, graphics heavy pages
with Flash (why? It's _so_ yesterday.) that take a long time to load,
think more informational content instead of pretty pictures. That is,
unless, your audience expects pretty instead. If there are lots of
graphics doing rollovers for buttons, why not try CSS instead?

I found http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com to be a great resource for these
design decisions. Then you can implement good design using whatever
tool(s) you like.

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