I need support while in Web Design class!

[Mr Initial Man]

My webdesign teacher has been extolling the virtues of DreamWeaver, saying that text coding takes far too much time. If you love me, please help me from being drawn to the Dark Side of webdesign (i.e. WYSIWYG) and remain in the light of text coding.

[A1ien51]

:) Good Luck

People like Drag, Drop, and Click Interfaces.

Everyone should learn HTML without an editor, you don't learn markup through a WYSIWYG editor! Than again some people say you should code directly in assembly.

Eric

[schizo]

Personally I just think your professor doesn't know how to code that well... and is either scared to learn, or scared to teach. Last I checked, Dreamweaver could not produce CSS layouts with XHTML 1.0 strict validated code. Furthermore, in the real world you may have multiple front-end developers using a variety of platforms... a WYSIWYG only complicates this situation.

[Jeff Mott]

It's not that people are scared to learn a different way; it's that people become very confident that the way they know is the correct way. This doesn't just happen with HTML -- if you first saw an original movie, you'd probably hate the remake, and if you first saw the remake, you'd probably hate the original. And there are other examples all throughout our lives. People get set in their ways.

It doesn't help that moving away from the WYSIWYG approach is difficult. You not only need to learn a new language, CSS, but you need to learn a whole new set of techniques -- that's the hard part.

We need to realize that it's a hard change. We shouldn't advocate with sharp criticism; we should persuade with demonstrations and examples of just how powerful and useful the structural HTML approach can be, like the CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/).

[WebJoel]

When I was taking college classes, my favorite professor-type insisted that we use "notepad.exe" for the first few assignments. That is how we learned. That is all I knew how to use for the first couple of months. Once we knew how to make web pages using that, -and in order to speed things along, -we were invited to switch to "editplus2", and HTML-editor.
I will always be appreciative to Mr. Holdman for making us do web page building 'the long, hard way' first. I highly recommend it to anyone.

[Waylander]

Yep, Its official.

WYSIWYG + Server Side Script = Chaos.

Not only is it a nightmare trying to integrate anything dynamic into WYSIWYG soup but html is a very good foundation to learn first which will then allow you to progress onto other harder and subsequently better paid scripting languages.

If you don't learn to script properly your chopping your skill set very short and narrowing your possible field of employment. That's all there is to it, if your fine with that then do it but if your not then bust out notepad and get cracking.

Waylander.

[MstrBob]

My webdesign teacher has been extolling the virtues of DreamWeaver, saying that text coding takes far too much time. If you love me, please help me from being drawn to the Dark Side of webdesign (i.e. WYSIWYG) and remain in the light of text coding.

I've heard that argument before. But if you were to spend the same amount of time learning proper HTML and CSS usage, instead of all the different tips and tricks of a WYSIWYG editor, you would be just as fast, if not faster by hand.

The biggest problem with WYSIWYG editors is that they are limiting. All the other problems, such as tag soup and invalid markup could be fixed by a competent development team. But at the end of the day, writing your page out by hand is much, much, much more flexible than using a GUI. Even the "professionals" who use DreamWeaver and the like end up editing the markup at least a bit to get it all exactly right. If you use a plastic hammer, you'll never have anything more than a toy website.

[JPnyc]

Tell your teacher to stick to what he/she knows, whatever that is. But 1 thing we do know, it's not web design/development.