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NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS
eldavojohn writes "The design director of NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, recently answered readers' questions in the Times's occasional feature 'Ask the Times.' He was asked how the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it. His answer begins: 'It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.'"
But don't your hands get tired?
This is the case for almost any dynamic website. There's no story here.
I find that hand-coding works for HTML/CSS, provided of course you include it in a scripting language like PHP.
It's less work than it sounds and the results DO look better - you get a more original look and things can be made to look exactly how you want, instead of being restrained by the wysiwyg software's design limitations.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
It's slashdot.org! /Wrong site?
Maybe we can use this idea to write programs, too.
The badge I used to put on all my sites...
The CB App. What's your 20?
...and yet they get 455(!) errors. That's not very good. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnytimes.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0.
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
Is NYT some godly thing I've never heard of before? Why is this news? Maybe if this was an article about the benefits of blah blah blah, maybe citing NYT as an example.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Registration evils aside, that's a viewpoint I can respect. I was taught to code webpages when my father handed me an HTML manual and taught me how to look up the source code of a webpage that did something I liked (I was probably 10). This was long before CSS, but I learned those the same way.
I can't say my webpages are as elegant or polished as NYTimes.com, but I'm sure they work on every browser. What's important is that I understand how and why they work.
I also recently inadvertently triggered an argument between my parents on the virtues of IDEs in software development. My dad likes them, my mom regards them as the bane of true programmers everywhere. What does /. think?
Let's look 'objectively' at this:
1. Handcoding takes a lot more effort and needs more 'actual' writers than before. So more techies keep their jobs in a recession.
Score: Hancoding 1: Dreamweaver: 0
2. Hancoding requires extensive knowledge of all CSS and DHTML codes plus javascript/JScript. So only the really good techies get the job, and not some script monkey. Survival of fittest.
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 0
3. Handcoding takes far more time than is necessary in a changing scenario of today's news. Effort not proportional to returns. As a shareholder, i would sue them for wasting money.
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 1
4. Dreamweaver allows preview easily and pretty much automates repeatable tasks. Handcoding requires a Mechanical Turk.
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 2
So its a tie.
I appreciate NYTimes sticking to manual tasks for an electronic page as an end user and a techie.
I hate them for wasting my money as a shareholder.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Dreamweaver basically incorporated Homesite several years ago.
While I do like the split development window(code/WYSIWYG), being a coder I spend most of my time in the code window and always have to check against multiple browsers.
I think having the WYSIWYG view is a benefit, although I hate having to hit F5 to refresh the WYSIWYG continuously.
The title says it all, that's what's missing from the writeup.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I just couldn't get the HTML to render AT ALL until I went to a specialist. He suggested that I "hand code" and they'd implant my HTML into my web server. It worked - twice! But it wasn't as fast as the NYTimes; it took almost 10 months to render.
How much work does that actually involve? I don't read their online edition, but I imagine that they have all their articles in a database and put its contents into an HTML wrapper. That involves coding the wrapper once, and maybe a couple of conversions in the article text to make it HTML-friendly. You can do this when the article is converted into the database, or you can do it on the fly in your scripts, but the point is it shouldn't be that difficult to do.
I agree with the person in the article about hand-coding. Even today, I still do my sites by hand with CSS/XHTML in the early stages because it IS faster to pin down bugs when you know what every tag is doing. Because of this, I've resisted changing to "Design View" in Dreamweaver. (Even in CS3, Dreamweaver still doesn't render exactly the way I want it to most of the time, and when it doesn't quite match what you get in browsers).
With that said, I have found that Dreamweaver's autocompletion of closing tags is nice in most cases in "Code View". It does speed up the coding process a bit, and it helps you find potential mistakes in your several layers of div-driven layouts when things get a little dicey.
Also, saying "I have used Dreamweaver" on your resume is probably going to be handy someday when decision-makers (i.e. PHBs) are looking for a web developer with Dreamweaver experience.
Templates, a decent text editor, and a Markdown or Textile reader with the option of macros. Maybe a short Perl, Python, or Ruby script to cherry-pick your macros (I do something similar at work with vim, erb, and RedCloth.)
Hand-coding everything is just plain silly.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
So, what is that in man-hours? Sorry, I mean web-monkey-hours.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Any self respecting web developer that is any good already knows this. The editor though is essentially all preference. He could have said Notepad.
I personally use Dreamweaver but only because I like it's project management. Never find myself in design view ever. Especially since with PHP Dreamweaver has no idea what to display.
I once built a child with my bare hands using nothing but some spare protein strands I had lying around.
Stupid comment by Vinh about Dreamweaver.
1. DW lets you code at the source code level if you choose.
2. DW is much faster--in Design View--at creating tables.
3. DW allows for flipping back and forth or split view.
4. DW does not rewrite your code (for the most part).
I use DW every day. I am not even conscious of flipping between the 2 views. Some things are done better in Design View and some in Code View.
CSS support is very good in DW.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A lot of newspapers, including the NYT, realized early on that they had to move onto the web in order to retain their readers. But despite this early insight, and 10+ years struggling to get viewers to come to their sites, none of them have figured out how to do a proper news web site. Not one.
Absurdities like use of hand-coded HTML and CSS are just the tip of the iceberg. What really bothers me is that nobody seems to have thought of a way, or even tried to think of a way, to properly use the Inverted Pyramid on a web site.
The Inverted Pyramid, for those of you who didn't take Journalism (I took it in high school) is a stylistic technique where you put the most important and newsworthy details of a story in the first paragraph. Slight less important stuff goes in the next paragraph, and the next, until you trail away with trivia at the end. That makes it easier for your editor to trim a story so it fits in the available space. More importantly (especially for an online newspaper, where space is not finite), it makes it easier for the reader to graze the news. You can be your own editor, on stop reading a story when the details are too fine to attract your interest.
You'd think that this would actually be easier to support online than in a physical newspaper. But news sites don't even try. They just dump the print edition online, then provide link farms for the stories, with a few stories getting special summaries.
And they're been similarly stupid with their classified ads. These used to make up something like a third of their income, before Craigslist stole all their customers. Now, you might think that there's no hope of competing with Craigslist, since most of its advertisers get a free ride. But classified ads aren't all that expensive, and advertisers wouldn't have stopped using them if Craigslist didn't do a better job of connected the right advertisers with the right customers.
The print classifieds were doomed in any case, but newspapers were ideally set up to turn their print classifieds business into an even more lucrative online classifieds business. But, as with so many other things, they never really tried.
Probably most of you don't care — you get your news from blogs. Me, I prefer to get my news from somebody who knows something about finding stuff out, who has some sense of professional ethics, and who doesn't simply regurgitate every rumor that sounds vaguely plausible. Unfortunately, that option is rapidly disappearing.
Hand coded gets you smaller pages, they load faster, and generally look better
I do feel vindicated though... I hand-code everything...
nano, notepad++, emacs... vi, I use them all
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Personally, I have come to really enjoy reading the online NY Times (and I don't even live in the US).
The re-design they did a couple years ago is a pleasure to navigate, to read (I love the fonts) and while the photos are always top notch, I must say the award goes to whoever makes the graphs. They have the most fantastic and unique ways of presenting data - far beyond a boring Excel bar graph. I am really really impressed by the interesting and informative graphs which are often highly interactive, and I would love to know who thinks them up.
At the end of the day, they use templates (I believe he says as much in TFA, IIRC, I read it a week or so ago) and hand tweak the site to make it sure it stays cross-platform pretty. Each story has a similar layout so it can't be hard for them to simply tweak by hand where needed.
great! ... but I thought that any website worth its stuff was already doing at least SOME hand coding to ensure viewability... if not all.
What are the man-hours to get some newbie web devels to try and troubleshoot spacing issues, what are the hours to look through countless contextual menu's to find the code that's bugging out, ever searched for a CSS bug through 1500 lines of CSS? Try it with an wisywig editor, it wont even pick up the error!
:)
I don't know about you but as for me and my experience doing things right the first time is far more prudent and far more efficient then cleaning up after a wisywig editor, I have written entire web applications via 'vim'. What do I have to show for it? No 'browser' issues, other than known bugs!
The advent of WSYWIG editors have proven good in some ways but when dealing with high-profile sites, I gotta say, if you use a WSYWIG editor to do anything other than basic layouts and to let it handle production code is really irresponsible, furthermore I would argue that anyone that does not have the knowledge to clean up after the editor is underqualified to be a web developer. And designers ARE NOT developers!
He doesn't mean that they hand-code every page -- he says very clearly that they use a CMS with templates. All he said is that they don't use a GUI tool to create the templates. This is true of just about any significant site. What is the imagined news here?
The pages would look even better and load even faster if they used Vi or Emacs. Obviously.
"And there be unix which have made themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake." - Matt. 19:12
Now if only their journalistic ethics would catch up, they'd be a great news site for any browser, any platform and any reader.
I really don't give a crap how it gets done if it gets done right, and I don't suppose they should either.
Tools are meant to be used when they help, not just because they're there.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Most web sites are hand-coded. Dreamweaver is a great editor too. Sites can have errors and still work fine since the css standards and browsers are still not in sync.
Holy shit! I used to use Homesite back in '96. I had no idea it was still in existence. Then again, I used to use Notepad and it's still around, too. I always got a kick out of the "Made with Notepad" websites :-)
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Is there any other way? Hell, it is CSS and HTML for Christ's sake.
Jamey
Jamey Kirby
For all the pros/cons on using a web site editor package vs writing code in a text editor, there's one issue that's been overlooked - how to manage links in a website with a large degree of depth and complexity.
As much as it may work in principle to build highly optimized pages by hand markup, it must be a nightmare to make any changes to something as tightly constructed as a hardwired web site.
However I know that certain sections are outsourced to consulting firms. Mostly the aggregated content.
Way to many hits if you ask me:
Google eldavojohn nytimes
CSS support is very good in DW.
Actually, no, it's not. At least through Dreamweaver 8, CSS is sort of a bolted-on afterthought. The Dreamweaver "Properties" pane and the CSS system do not play well together. Dreamweaver has a useful GUI for table-based layout, but falls down on DIV-based layout. (This isn't entirely Dreamweaver's fault. DIV-based "float" and "clear" just weren't a well chosen set of primitives. It's trying to solve a 2D problem with a 1D mechanism.)
Dreamweaver 3 was easier to use.
One thing the story forgets to mention is the reason WYSIWYGs exist, for the stupid fucktards. Those who must use WYSIWYGs and not a normal text edictor are obviously too fucking stupid to even exist let alone use a computer.
While the purists are going to argue that valid markup defines the quality of the code on a given website the reality of the real world always tends to rear it's ugly head and debunk that fantasy.
/rant >.>
In the real world us web developers have to deal with interoperability on many different levels. We have to make sure the layout looks the same on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari with Windows XP & Vista, OSX, and Linux using the same code base. Most of this however has a lot to do with how talented your CSS developer is. And unfortunately for you kiddies, any less isn't perfect.
So to spell it out for those that don't know, here's the real difference between WYSIWYG and pure text:
In a WYSIWYG editor you tend to do everything the same way every time you do it. That means that all your links, images, and code snippets come from the same code base and therefore have all the same pitfalls and good points. Unfortunatly the wonderful world of DOM doesn't work that way. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and objects like Flash, Quicktime, and Java have very specific ways that they interact with each other and the browser and so what you generally find is that the reason you code by hand is not for the specific reason of coding by hand but simply put you really can not build good, quality websites with WYSIWYG editors. At some point you will most assuredly find yourself digging in the HTML.
Finally, on the topic of validating your markup. The Markup validaters that are out there are only good as tools of the trade and shouldn't be used as the end-all be-all certification of quality markup. They are tools that should be used by a web developer to run through and make sure they can be as close to valid as possible but I am willing to bet that out of the top 100 sites on the internet, the front page of all of them will produce Markup validation errors. The reason is simple: The validation rules are so restrictive that there is no point even worrying about them. It would be impossible to make a working website by being totally loyal to the markup rules.
Especially with the validator's stupidity in treating & signs in the href attribute of my a elements as the beginning of an entity which it's not!
Having been a professional webdev for about a decade I don't find this surprising at all. I've never worked with a great webdev that used a wysiwyg editor for coding. Simple code reuse and templating can go a long way toward keeping code consistent and centralized while minimizing repetitive coding. When things go wrong with your code, as they inevitably will, not knowing what code a wysiwyg editor generated and why can leave you high and dry... Besides, how can you personally evolve web development practices if you're limited to the widgets a wysiwyg editor provides :)
I hear they have people who hand-write the news stories: sentence by sentence, word by word. Can you imagine?
I swore off WYSIWYG HTML editors with the first version of GoLive. I thought it was pretty slick until I looked at the HTML it was creating -- what a mess! I am sure the technology has advance since then. . . ? Still, I have been hand coding HTML or using some other tool to generate it ever since. This disincentives HTML overly complex layouts, which I think is a good thing.
Personally I hate the kind of fluff that WYSIWYG editors tend to encourage. Too easy to create pages that take way longer to load and way more effort to "interact" with in order to get the information that they are supposed to contain. I realize that these editors only enable bad presentation, but still.
If you have a content framework in place, fancy editors don't offer anything other than a way to add needless clutter and make things more difficult to manage.
That explains why it takes so long for new stories to arrive. This one's been up for an hour already!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
The guy who wrote this news piece, seconded by the guy who submitted it to Slashdot with an honorable mention to the admin who posted it. I mean really, what respectable developer or consulting team that delivers custom software DOESN'T hand code HTML? Dreamweaver is ATROCIOUS garbage, and only hacks or folks working low-end brochure sites would even attempt to build a site with a WYSIWIG application (maybe a dirty prototype, but not production code). As a UE consultant who designs sites for Fortune 500 companies I can testify that EVERYONE hand codes their apps, if only because its the only way to get even remotely uniform presentation on FF, IE6/7, and Safari. The centrality of AJAX/DHTML and RIA solutions only makes this even more critical since their are that many more moving parts and performance optimization is just that much more critical. I did find the mention of Homesite funny... I spoke with some folks recently on this topic (I have a deep bg in client side tech), mentioned that all my teams use Homesite for CS dev, and lierally saw jaws drop (this was a group of senior mgrs who were around when Homesite was young.. read Allaire). People were amazed that Homesite was still in use, but the truth is that these tools kind of reached their zenith in the early 2000s, and the market just isn't really big enough to merit chasing. The funny thing is that, from a hand-coding perspective, the combination of Homesite and Topstyle (both by Bradbury, oddly enough) simply can't be beat (at least on Windows). I can only imagine what a client would say if my team took their $2 mil and built a solution with Dreamweaver type code... HA! -rt
DUH!
I hand code everything by hand too, it's the best way for me.
I used to use Dreamweaver years ago when i was learning html and i think it's really great for starters, cause you don't have to learn lots of different tags and their attributes to start making websites, in fact i think it actually helped me to learn html.
But as soon as i got a good grasp of html and started coding in php DW just didn't feel right, plus i got tired of all the crappy html it generates automatically, so i started trying different text editors until i found Emacs.
Today i code every single piece of code i write in any language using Emacs and i totally love it, for me it has several advantages:
1 - you don't have to use the mouse to move fast in your files, (in fact you don't have to use a mouse at all)
2 - there are editing modes for php, css, javascript, html, xml etc....
3 - you can automate common tasks by writing your own skeletons and lisp functions, this makes you even faster
4 - it's already installed in almost every linux desktop or server
5 - you can make quick adjustments by logging to your webserver via ssh and running emacs there, instead of editing, uploading, editing, uploading, editing, uploading....
So in my own experience i would recommend Dreamweaver or other wysiwyg editor to anyone just starting in html, and i think most of those will drop DW eventually.
Why the fuck not?
'WYSIWYG' are terrible and, in my opinion, hold absolutely no increase in productivity to anyone who knows and understand what s/he is doing.
The timeline for Homesite
- Created by Nick Bradbury (the guy who later built Topstyle, the BEST CSS editor out there, surprise surprise)
- sold to Allaire,
- absorbed by Macromedia when they bought Allaire,
- incorporated into Dreamweaver while also kept as a sideline product (both because of a strong community and because of the ColdFusion community, which for those who don't know is HUUUUUGGEE for some odd reason)
- and finally picked up by Adobe.
Great program, I still use it today for all my coding needs (as do all my development teams).
-rt
This comes as no surprise. I recently worked with a large newspaper in New York to implement a content management system and found the group had real difficulties enforcing editorial standards.
Part of the problem was training, the staff was largely composed of former photo editors who were unfamiliar with producing photos for the web (we had multiple instances of 300 MB photos being deployed on the front page of the site). Culturally, newspaper people seem to be inclined towards repeatable processes and highly resistant to change in this area without a great deal of encouragement and hand holding.
Part of the problem also was the technology itself, believe it or not we made things too simple. In order to insert breaks in pages we added buttons to the user interface which were routinely ignored by the staff (even the editors) in favor of hand coding complex HTML structures. In order to create media insertion hooks, we created an extensive AJAX interface, which was disfavored over an existing photo catalog that had been in place before we got there.
Change is something that needs to be introduced gradually, and the process that works is the one that will win out in newspapers.
M
After further examination, their reporting seems intact ..but their html/css has a clear liberal bias.
My son is learning to program in high school. My wife began learning in high school and we met when we both worked as programmers. My father-in-law started programming in the '60s on an IBM 1620 (a decimal machine). Given how old we were when our son was born, there may well be fourth generation coders out there somewhere.
I guess my father-in-law's two other grandsons, age 10 and 13 are also third generation.
There's a terrible Slashdot confusion here in comments. Vinh was saying that they hand code templates (i.e., code HTML using their own token language interspersed). I wrote about the rise of credibility once again for handcoding, and the problems that templating causes for GUI tools in this article at TidBITS. The summary is that all database-driven systems use templates; GUI tools are bad at previewing CMS-based database-driven templates.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
There is a difference in many (most?) text-based browsers (e.g., lynx/links) between setting alt = "" and omitting the alt attribute entirely.
Setting the attribute to a null string results in the null being "displayed", effectively removing the element from the rendered page. Failing to set it, by contrast, causes the browser to supply its own alt text for the image (lynx uses the image filename).
The result of the latter is that the page becomes littered with irrelevant text everywhere an image with no alt attribute appears. This is annoying, at best, to sighted users, and could potentially render the page completely unintelligible to anyone relying on a screen reader.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Hand coding HTML and CSS is my prefered method, I don't find it hard or time consuming. I get clean code which easily validates with the wc3 standard.
Also when I'm involved with javascript programming I need to create layers(or HTML in 3d!) which no wysiwyg editors can provide.
I really don't understand how people can prefer a wysiwyg editor. Spending all that shitty time learning a UI and not being able to understand the difference between div id or div class.
The real reason the New York Times website looks so good? I bet it's not because they handcode, because coding (hand or WYSIWYG) is the final step... I bet it's because their page is designed by properly trained and experienced graphic artists along with trained typographers and layout artists. Newspapers have lived and died by their presentation and design for a couple of centuries now.
The problem with bad presentation on the web doesn't spring from bad tools or bad design - it springs from web designers who prefer the unsupported opinion of the usability guru of the month to this body of experience.
That's not fair. I didn't get any errors at all on my page. And after all that work hand coding the HTML and the CSS inside PHP.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I feel that information is crammed, and that the fonts are unbearable.
My opinion of nytimes.com before I read this article was that they were stuck on designing a newspaper and tried to make the website look like one. I always felt that it was a known fact that serifs are better for print and san-serifs are better for computer screens...and they're using serifs for the main text.
They do not hand code individual article pages, just the templates for their CMS. If it's a good CMS it tracks the links within the site and prevents breakage during changes.
If a content Website has a large degree of depth and complexity, there's no excuse for hand coding the whole thing. There are plenty of free CMS's available that work pretty well.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
DisIntegrated Development Environment. There is more to integration that having all the parts on hand.
Well, as a rule, those dismiss and despise hand-coding website sources who grew up on wysiwyhtg (what you see is what you hope to get) junk. It is so, just swallow it.
I don't think hand-coding, by choosing a proper editor is a time waste or a manpower-waste. Well, if you have good coders, that is. Making dreamweaver puppies drop it and start hand-coding screams for disaster. As always, the rule is use what you have (resources, people, knowledge) properly.
One could argue certain technologies would require so much effort and resources if hand-coded, that it really would be unreasonable to do so. Agreed. But, it's not the technology that chooses you, it's you who picks a technology. Think twice before jumping into something big time.
And it's not true, that hand-coding makes harder to create validation-compliant sites. Actually it can make you get used to follow such compliance rules more rigorously.
All in all, there's no shame in using either way, it's the resources you have, the goals you set, the technology you choose, the business constraints you must follow that should make you decide, and not personal preference or belief.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
why is this news? Professionals might use dreamweaver or equivalent for a little quick prototyping, but nothing spat out by a wysiwyg is going on the web.
The days of everyone's websites being filled with "authored by frontpage" comments are long over.
What struck me most about the article was the site's level of staffing... eleven visual designers, information architects and design technologists in his group alone, not including outside web editors/producers, graphics and multimedia teams, and the software engineers on the CMS team.
At the community newsmagazine for which I work, I wear all those hats. Granted, it's nowhere near the size of the NY Times or nytimes.com. The print edition contains about 40-45 stories each week, and after the paper goes to press Wednesday night, I get all the content on the web in about a half hour using a custom Applescript Studio-based CMS, publishing direct from our QuarkXpress layouts into a MySQL database, which feeds both the PHP-based web front end and the weekly e-newsletter. The goal of the site was to be a literal dump of the print edition onto the web in the most effecient way possible -- meaning, me working as little as possible since I'm paid hourly.
The previous web-based CMS we were using six years ago was so cumbersome it took at least four hours to get the paper posted online (and it looked like shit once it was up there).
On the new redesign of the site I've been working on for the past month I could have used my own team of "design technologists" just to find workarounds for all of IE's stupid rendering quirks.
As far as not using Dreamweaver -- well, duh. BBEdit all the way.
As a professional web developer, I am surprised that this is even news. I would have found it surprising if they were using a WYSIWYG application to generate their site. I don't know of any huge sites that do this. Some get by using a CMS, but they're generally more limited in scope and more vanilla in nature.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Your #1 and #2 are only "benefits" for a couple of people (the specific techies who work for the NYT). The company as a whole would benefit much more from having fewer and less-trained (i.e. cheaper) coders.
A bad IDE will write code for you. It will be canned, standardized, and, depending on the IDE, inefficient, poorly commented, hard to follow (god forbid you change something...like say MSVS auto-generated ADO.NET DB connection code...unless you know exactly what you're doing), and/or containing a lot of extra crap. Take a look at web pages made with MS Front Page. Especially the older versions of Front Page. Ugh...
A good IDE doesn't write code for you. It helps you write better code faster by helping catch spelling errors, help keep your code consistent (auto-indenting is my favorite feature), and help automate tedious, repetitive tasks (Notepad++ and pretty much every command line editor descendant on Linix/Unix have duplicate line commands available via keyboard shortcut. So simple, so useful...so hard to find in windows apps...)
A good coder will know when to let the IDE do its thing, and when to roll up his sleeves and do it himself.
At the end of the day they're just tools.
Better results? Probably. Faster? No way. Never. Not gonna happen. Maybe they mean faster in the way that it is faster for guys who hand code lines of html all day to hand code lines of html all day because they don't have the first clue of how to use a WYSIWYG editor? If they know code so well, why not use Dreamweaver in pure code mode? The management tools of the suite alone are worth the ?extra? time.
I've worked on a number of large sites such as that: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ = hand coded. http://www.thesun.co.uk/ = hand coded. http://www.nhs.uk/ = hand coded. http://www.metrofrance.com/ = hand coded. I could go on but I think you get the idea. Sure those sites use CMS systems and templates that spit out the HTML but it was all hand coded in a text editor before being added to the back end. I would guess that this is actually far more common than using a WYSIWG editor for HTML & CSS creation these days.
Sure they handcode the css templates. For the actual stories, which likely go into the database of the CMS and contain little more than a few paragraph tags, they probably generate the html with some kind of editor so that all the reporters are relieved of the burden of knowing basic html
There's no substitute for handcoding, but that doesn't mean it's always appropriate or necessary everywhere.
I just want to point out that the three things that matters most for the web came together in freak coincidence with the launch of the iPhone.
:-)
When Steve Jobs (who cares about the user experience) demonstrated the iPhone, he choose to point the browser to New York Times (who cares about clean HTML) which ran an add for Edward Tufte (who cares about information design) it all came together...
None of this could have happened if it was not for the hand coded HTML of New York Times. HTML is not only about presenting information, it is about marking it up in a reusable way.
If you want to follow some of the thoughts on the browser as information broker I suggest starting at Alex Faaborg from the Mozilla Team. If you want to read about interaction design I recommend Bill Moggridge.
If you want to learn something new I recommend you to take some courses and stop reading too many comments on slashdot
Since the vast majority of the articles are plain text, they probably just have a couple of regular expressions and similar logic to format the text as needed. The plain-text article just sits in a database, gets called up, and gets transformed for layout in a newspaper, or layout for the web when displayed to the user/printer/etc. It's pretty easy to do.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
I'm sure this has been said already but the nytimes site has over 454 errors! Gez, maybe they'd be better off using dreamweaver or hire some competent content submitters.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
(AKA Lexington Herald-Leader)is also hand-coded. At least it was 18 months ago when I worked there.
...what I've said for years: IDE's are for p#$$!@s.
Great, now if only they would hire the best journalists!
fails with 26 errors.
They may well hand code everything, 'cause it really looks like they do. The link in the OP just proves the point, its the most bland page I've seen in years. OK, i dont always look for eyecandy when reading the news, but this is like something from the 70's.
I believe hand coding is the best practice but like other people have stated you can use dreamweaver in standard code view and it's exactly the same as using notepad. I have been working on a new design for my online portfolio and a few features that I have been finding very useful are the validators, the ability of find and replace that you can use throughout your managed sites which can save someone a great deal of time when working on a large site. I learned how to develop web pages when I was in high school using notepad. Since then I have completed my Bachelors in Information Technology Web Development. Dreamweaver brings alot more to the table other than just having the WYSIWYG feature. I hand code through DW and also use the split mode at times and I haven't found that DW would add unnecessary code to my pages. Front Page on the other page adds a bunch of garbage code to one's page.
Anyone who's read even a modicum of literature would be aware that misspelt is the older/English spelling of the "American" misspelled. Of course, for anyone educated in our school system who lacks the interest or motivation to go beyond the standard curriculum, 100% reliance on the spell-checking function of their browser would lead them to believe that misspelt is mispelled. :-)
:-)
I must say however, that your insistence on lumping everyone in this country into the "ignorant American" stereotype is also pretty annoying and reinforces negative aspects the snobby European stereotype.
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Why is this news? I've been a web developer myself and know plenty of other web developers who work for major companies like the NYTimes (though not specifcally any who work at NYTimes), and it's just not surprising any more that developers actually hand code. If you're a web developer and you don't hand code, or if you've hired one who doesn't, then that developer needs to update their skills.
FWIW, the NYT homepage is still full of careless validation errors, though it's quite clear from looking at the source code that much of it has been hand coded.
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I'm far from a being a professional webdesigner, I just do it as a hobby, but when I do, I love and use Homesite5. I'm not hardcore enough to use vi or notepad.
I think tag editors really are the best option; you just can't trust a WYSIWYG editor to work well for all browsers, and the total gobbleygook that Front page or Word puts in HTML pages (as viewed through their source code) is astonishingly confusing and wasteful.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I believe hand coding is the best practice but like other people have stated you can use dreamweaver in standard code view and it's exactly the same as using notepad.
I hand code HTML, but I try not to use that HTML directly... rather I take that HTML and use it to guide the templates and scripts that my text is and other objects are embedded in. This involves using a lot of explicitly classed tags and pushing the actual style off to CSS. I have avoided using HTML generation tools except as a way to experiment with different approaches to getting the results I want, because the output is never directly usable for this approach.
Is this close to the way you use Dreamweaver, and whether it is or not do you think it would be useful in this kind of workflow?
CSS is at its roots a declarative rules-based language, just shy of being a full general purpose programming language (anyone with conjectures on whether CSS will one day be turing complete?)
To date, nobody has created a comprehensive direct-manipulation style GUI experience for declarative rules-based languages. It's a UI-hard problem. I am not sure it will ever be solved.
For example, how do you represent:
within a GUI paradigm, except through a code editor?
Instead of addressing this UI-hard problem, authoring tools invariably support a subset of the full language via direct manipulation (and offer a code editor for the rest). That subset may be super for a large number of use cases. However, its hardly surprising that operators of a large complex site like the NYTimes skip the GUI and write to the metal. Why limit yourself to a subset when a hand-coded ruleset can take full advantange of the elegance, compactness and expressiveness of the language?
I do find it sad that in the first generation WYSIWIG publishing tools like Frame, Quark, Illustrator etc, had good GUI-based styling systems, but on the web we have regressed to a code editor.
If they are done by competent people.
/., guess that is also coded by hand.
Normal workflow is that there is a "visual code" or front end code done by designer / xhtml / css / js delivered, and this get implemented in the cms. This means that the data ends up in between the tag start and stopâ¦
Look at
All templates I deliver is validating, sometimes there will be errors because the publishing filter og the publisher of an article and such does erroneous syntax.
Tools:
Xylescope
Firefox with firebug and webdev tools
Pararells with all browsers installed (ie3-7 +++)
Textmate
Cssedit
These two is basically texteditors with enchantments like codecompletions and code templates.
I could use DW at least the texeditor part is OK, but the wysiwyg is good to paste in stuff, but you really got to know what you are doing. I do not recommend DW because of the price and the conservatism in the program, if they made it from what the web is today it would be ok.
+1 Insightful
I feel I'm qualified to respond to this, since I have actually written a CMS for a newspaper.
Odds are that nytimes uses something NITF to store the stories themselves.
The reporters use either InCopy or Quark CopyDesk to write the stories, marking up their stories in that tool. An automated process then converts the stories to NITF. Paragraph and Character styles get converted as needed. Then the whole NITF gets stored in their database.
When needed, the NITF gets converted into html when the user views the story (who knows how, although XSLT is what we use).
If you go look at the specs for NITF, you'll see a very complete markup spec that handles everything from embedded video to an italicized word.
... they've been putting $ where the & should go.
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It's awful, especially as these are easy errors that can be fixed without any problem whatsoever. The vast majority of errors are: XHTML syntax for empty elements in an HTML page. Unencoded ampersands. Forgetting required attributes like alt and type.
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HTML used to be a programming skill. So were nroff and troff. Let it go.
Son, someday all this will belong to your ex-wife.
The more code you build on code, it will come to a point where you will not get any results because of all of the underlying bugs. Cannot remember which book that is from, but it seems like it fits this pretty good.
They do use NITF, on the incoming and internally.
NITF, unless I'm mistaken, utilizes a markup language that is, far and away, the best for the storage, analysis of, and re-distribution (in multiple formats for multiple purposes) of content; and that would be: XML. Nothing beats it for industrial strength document/content handling. Just my 2 cents on the XML question.
I've been using Textpad for many years, not just for HTML, but for ASP/PHP too. Like any decent tool, if you know how to use it, it's fast and efficient - except with TexPad, I never have to battle to make it accept something it doesn't like about my code. I even prefer TP over UltraEdit. It's macro capabilities are second to none, and that's what makes code fly from your fingers. You just have to set it up in an efficient way.
.NET stuff. HTML/ASP isn't so complicated you need auto-complete, and usually you already have your own personal library of code that you know well and use time and again. So there again, setting up useful macros really helps. TextPad forever!
Exploring classes and methods is fun, but that's for
let's blame dreamweaver... not the guy who chopped up his photoshop design with some wizard tool, and had never even looked at the code before sending it over to the next guy.