HTML
is the assembler language of the web, and that’s a good thing. All sorts of
tools claim they will make your life easier and save you from the awful, nerdy
depths of HTML. My conclusion: the tools are trouble; HTML is simple and
powerful; just get over it, learn and use HTML!
There’s
a pattern here. I have suffered through decades of tools that are
supposed to “insulate” you from the grungy details of actual programming, while
in the end, limiting what you can do, and not being so very easy to use after
all.
Here’s
the background: My wife has a personal web site. I am her webmaster. A little
while ago, she decided she wanted to change the site in a major way. The tool
I’ve been using for site creation and editing is way past its expiration date.
So I decided to start over and dive into the wonderful world of site editing
tools. This has got to be easy, I thought. Even Microsoft Word says that it can
create and edit HTML.
“Not
so Fast,” cries out the world of practical reality to me.
I
tried a few “easy to use” site creation and editing tools. I didn’t want to get
fancy. I just went to my hosting provider’s website, and did simple internet searches. I tried a few tools. I wasn’t happy with the results for
various reasons (it couldn’t import my current site, it had templates but they
were all ugly and you couldn’t circumvent them, etc.).
Then
I tried importing the home page of the site into Microsoft Word. It appeared to
work. I edited the page, eliminating most of the content, and displayed the
results. Wrong! The original had a big-font title that was colored and
underlined. Nothing I edited should have changed the color or made the text and
the underline different. What’s going on here!
I
did not want to dive into details. I really just wanted to get this done
so I could move on! But to make a long story short, I ended up getting the HTML
generated by the old site builder I used and the HTML that resulted from Word
and studying them. Part of why I didn’t want to do this is that I’m not
an expert HTML programmer. But I sucked it up and dove
in. Among other things, I learned:
HTML isn’t so hard
I already knew the basics (it's just programming, like anything else, and diving in confirmed that view). Even without a deep background, you can learn it quickly. Here’s
an example from a nice site (http://www.arachnoid.com/lutusp/html_tutor.html)
HTML Code |
|
Browser Display |
I want to
<B>emphasize</B> this! |
I want to emphasize this! |
Word
was astoundingly bad
There
was more crap in the file inserted by Word for its own nefarious purposes than
the original text. And it screwed up the original appearance!
HTML
is like assembler language, and that’s good
I’ve
always been a back-to-basics kind of guy, and never felt particularly limited
during my many years of programming in assembler language. In fact, because of
macro pre-processors, assemblers can be amazingly productive because you can customize the environment to suit the
application, something which the “easy to use,” “higher level” tools make
difficult.
Line
Up, all you so-called easy-to-use tools, and Die
Or
die a natural death. I don’t care how you get there. Just get it done!
Conclusion
I’ve
been writing software for more than 40 years, and the more things change, the
more they stay the same. Computers, I willingly grant you, are smaller, faster
and cheaper; they hold more and communicate faster. But software just gets more
bloated and heavy-weight, all the while promising greater ease of use and
functional fitness. Going back to basics is refreshing and, sometimes, the only
way to get the job done.
"The tools are trouble; HTML is simple and powerful; just get over it, learn and use HTML!"
I totally agree. After doing HTML/JavaScript development for over 15 years now, I've come to the same conclusion. I found the only tool that has worked great for me, though, was TextMate ( http://macromates.com/ ) because it's a simple and lightweight code editor that doesn't get in the way.
Posted by: Ismail Elshareef | 05/21/2010 at 12:23 PM