HTML, Assembler Language, and Easy-To-Use Tools

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.

 

Comments

[Ismail Elshareef]

"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.