[PHP] WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
Hello to All! I've been monitoring this emotional listing from the beginning and feel the need to bring out some of my personal experience on this exciting matter of WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user' 1) I started back when there where no GUI's available anywhere! In time I became quite comfortable with keystrokes for everything. Even loved the keystroke! I would be heard to say even years later, Ahh, you new kids are spoiled and know not a thing of the way it should be; the power-user way! 2) Times are different now; memory and disk space are not a big deal with the programmer. One does not have to account for every byte available. Hence, the GUI's are in force today and newer professionals are quite proficient in their use. The old timer power-user is becoming less and less in number. The new kids love the GUI. 3) I have noticed a painful quality of the GUI only experience of Dreamweaver and Photoshop. That is, new and usually young people invest their time learning Dreamweaver and Photoshop becoming proficient creating web pages that look great. However, they rarely look at the code once the project works in the browser and is ready for the web. I am involved with such a situation now and the GUI kids have no idea what the html code really looks like and are not interested in the coding. I'm talking about the 'non-compliance of html W3 Spec' in all their files. The HTML code is embarrassing to look at, capitalizations, missing end tags, added end tags, on and on and on. And what happened to the Doctype? This comes from spending most of the time mouse clicking instead of typing in the code (at least after one cuts and pastes into the code we make sure we look at it and adjust it to fit properly in every aspect, then get rid of the extra pasted in excess not needed, don't just comment it out. I do not use Dreamweaver, I prefer a text editor keystrokes to do the work. I've lost an entire days worth of work because of the fabled DW memory crash. It is a huge program with parts of it that are buggy and slow. It is very powerful as well with its good aspects. I like the 'clean and mean' approach. I know where everything is and there is no wondering about things. I go over every piece of code in every page. It must look good as well as work to my satisfaction. When someone clicks on 'view source' they are looking at the HTML of yours! You are responsible for every thing you do. To some of you I ask, Did you forget about this or do you just not care? Bottom line: Use what ever means necessary that brings you to a quality, polished, well-coded web app. And look at the whole App. Every part of it. You will be judged by your output. Even what you don't want people to see, if they can see it they will judge you by it. Also, I do not believe in making fun of people or their views on a subject even if I feel I know better. Better a friend than an enemy. Great Coding and success in life! Hope I haven't bored anyone out there. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
On 4/12/07, Chetan Graham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello to All! I've been monitoring this emotional listing from the beginning and feel the need to bring out some of my personal experience on this exciting matter of WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user' 1) I started back when there where no GUI's available anywhere! In time I became quite comfortable with keystrokes for everything. Even loved the keystroke! I would be heard to say even years later, Ahh, you new kids are spoiled and know not a thing of the way it should be; the power-user way! 2) Times are different now; memory and disk space are not a big deal with the programmer. One does not have to account for every byte available. Hence, the GUI's are in force today and newer professionals are quite proficient in their use. The old timer power-user is becoming less and less in number. The new kids love the GUI. 3) I have noticed a painful quality of the GUI only experience of Dreamweaver and Photoshop. That is, new and usually young people invest their time learning Dreamweaver and Photoshop becoming proficient creating web pages that look great. However, they rarely look at the code once the project works in the browser and is ready for the web. I am involved with such a situation now and the GUI kids have no idea what the html code really looks like and are not interested in the coding. I'm talking about the 'non-compliance of html W3 Spec' in all their files. The HTML code is embarrassing to look at, capitalizations, missing end tags, added end tags, on and on and on. And what happened to the Doctype? This comes from spending most of the time mouse clicking instead of typing in the code (at least after one cuts and pastes into the code we make sure we look at it and adjust it to fit properly in every aspect, then get rid of the extra pasted in excess not needed, don't just comment it out. I do not use Dreamweaver, I prefer a text editor keystrokes to do the work. I've lost an entire days worth of work because of the fabled DW memory crash. It is a huge program with parts of it that are buggy and slow. It is very powerful as well with its good aspects. I like the 'clean and mean' approach. I know where everything is and there is no wondering about things. I go over every piece of code in every page. It must look good as well as work to my satisfaction. When someone clicks on 'view source' they are looking at the HTML of yours! You are responsible for every thing you do. To some of you I ask, Did you forget about this or do you just not care? Bottom line: Use what ever means necessary that brings you to a quality, polished, well-coded web app. And look at the whole App. Every part of it. You will be judged by your output. Even what you don't want people to see, if they can see it they will judge you by it. Also, I do not believe in making fun of people or their views on a subject even if I feel I know better. Better a friend than an enemy. Great Coding and success in life! Hope I haven't bored anyone out there. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php Just another point... the generated markup is probably going to have low accessibility which limits screen readers and search engines alike. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
At 4/12/2007 08:48 AM, Chetan Graham wrote: WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user' Vonda McIntyre used to describe the three stages in the evolution of science fiction. In the first stage it was all about the technology, the new gadgets we could dream up; Look at this cool space ship we built! In the second stage, writers had accepted the wonders of the new technology and started describing what you could do with it: Look where we can go in our space ship! And the third stage, the one that flowered in the 1960s and 70s when Viet Nam and LSD and feminism turned science fiction inside out, we were writing about how the technology and our use of it transforms those who use it: Who do we become after a thousand years of FTL space travel? I can see a similar progression in any technology including computer use: from the early gear-smiths to the Univac tube-jockeys to the make-it-yourself Atari hounds to the code-it-yourself programmers to the mavens of Web 2.0... at each stage there's less preoccupation with yesterday's core work; we take those parts for granted and focus on how far they can take us tomorrow. Like you, I grew up coding by hand -- not coding in binary machine language on punch cards as my older brother did in the early 60s at Columbia, but I cut my programming teeth in the early 80s on BASIC and Z-80 Assembler and PL/M. I remember being appalled when I wrote my first disassembler and looked under the hood at the machine code produced by the PL/M compiler: it was so incredibly inefficient! The lower-level the language, the more crucial each instruction seems. These days my languages of preference are PHP, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Any one instructional unit in these scripts surely results in thousands or millions of machine instructions. I used to stipple each dot; now I paint in broad strokes. I have stopped worrying about the low level so much -- to whom does it really matter which is more efficient, foreach() or while(), if you're not executing tens of thousands of them in a single script? -- instead focusing on the much bigger pictures of interface design, application design, security, interoperability, and user friendliness. So I don't blame the newcomers for caring less about the nitty gritty details under the hood -- we're all that way. You obviously care about how clean your PHP code is, but how much do you care about how clean the machine code is that actually executes when your script hits the interpreter? You probably don't. It's not in your field of vision. You're looking up, and ahead. I've never used a WYSIWYG HTML editor -- my test drives of many editors have produced such gawdawful markup that I happily continue to code by hand, quickly and well. However I have been told by many people that Dreamweaver can be set up to produce lean, clean XHTML. I suspect that the way to do it is to turn off nearly all of its intelligence. Like most of the Microsoft applications, its attempts to second-guess our intentions result in garbage out. Those apps were apparently build by well-meaning programmers whose mandate was to care more about the appearance of what you see than the quality of what you get. ...Now that I've had my say... and as dear as this topic is to my heart... it's really off-topic for this list. I'd recommend WD-L http://webdesign-L.com/ Regards, Paul __ Paul Novitski Juniper Webcraft Ltd. http://juniperwebcraft.com -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
On Apr 12, 2007, at 2:46 PM, Paul Novitski wrote: At 4/12/2007 08:48 AM, Chetan Graham wrote: WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user' Vonda McIntyre used to describe the three stages in the evolution of science fiction. In the first stage it was all about the technology, the new gadgets we could dream up; Look at this cool space ship we built! In the second stage, writers had accepted the wonders of the new technology and started describing what you could do with it: Look where we can go in our space ship! And the third stage, the one that flowered in the 1960s and 70s when Viet Nam and LSD and feminism turned science fiction inside out, we were writing about how the technology and our use of it transforms those who use it: Who do we become after a thousand years of FTL space travel? I can see a similar progression in any technology including computer use: from the early gear-smiths to the Univac tube-jockeys to the make-it-yourself Atari hounds to the code-it-yourself programmers to the mavens of Web 2.0... at each stage there's less preoccupation with yesterday's core work; we take those parts for granted and focus on how far they can take us tomorrow. Like you, I grew up coding by hand -- not coding in binary machine language on punch cards as my older brother did in the early 60s at Columbia, but I cut my programming teeth in the early 80s on BASIC and Z-80 Assembler and PL/M. I remember being appalled when I wrote my first disassembler and looked under the hood at the machine code produced by the PL/M compiler: it was so incredibly inefficient! The lower-level the language, the more crucial each instruction seems. These days my languages of preference are PHP, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Any one instructional unit in these scripts surely results in thousands or millions of machine instructions. I used to stipple each dot; now I paint in broad strokes. I have stopped worrying about the low level so much -- to whom does it really matter which is more efficient, foreach() or while(), if you're not executing tens of thousands of them in a single script? -- instead focusing on the much bigger pictures of interface design, application design, security, interoperability, and user friendliness. So I don't blame the newcomers for caring less about the nitty gritty details under the hood -- we're all that way. You obviously care about how clean your PHP code is, but how much do you care about how clean the machine code is that actually executes when your script hits the interpreter? You probably don't. It's not in your field of vision. You're looking up, and ahead. I've never used a WYSIWYG HTML editor -- my test drives of many editors have produced such gawdawful markup that I happily continue to code by hand, quickly and well. However I have been told by many people that Dreamweaver can be set up to produce lean, clean XHTML. I suspect that the way to do it is to turn off nearly all of its intelligence. Like most of the Microsoft applications, its attempts to second-guess our intentions result in garbage out. Those apps were apparently build by well-meaning programmers whose mandate was to care more about the appearance of what you see than the quality of what you get. ...Now that I've had my say... and as dear as this topic is to my heart... it's really off-topic for this list. I'd recommend WD-L http://webdesign-L.com/ Very good points indeed. The only caveat is that a lot of times you need to get at the code that DW/PS produces, either to fix something that they can't handle, or to change something that (DW here) won't let you change. Trying to sort out the messes that they create can make you old before your time. Can't remember the last time I had to update the machine code because PHP wouldn't run properly... ;) Ed -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 16:07 -0500, Edward Vermillion wrote: On Apr 12, 2007, at 2:46 PM, Paul Novitski wrote: Can't remember the last time I had to update the machine code because PHP wouldn't run properly... ;) *PFFT* Newbie! ;) Cheers, Rob. -- .. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `' -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
On Thu, April 12, 2007 10:48 am, Chetan Graham wrote: I'm talking about the 'non-compliance of html W3 Spec' in all their files. The HTML code is embarrassing to look at, capitalizations, missing end tags, added end tags, on and on and on. And what happened to the Doctype? You should be able to con them into making their pages W3C compliant. I'll be DW et al even have fancy GUI buttons to check. If not, put HTML Validator in their FireFox they use to check their pages, configure it to kick in, and tell them that they need a green check in the bottom-right to really be kosher. There's really no excuse for even DW to dump out invalid code. -- Some people have a gift link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So? -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
