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NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS

Posted by kdawson on from the all-the-finest-sites dept.

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.'"

2 of 496 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Benefits vs Issues by rhavenn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 No, given a good IDE with some basics it takes less effort. Every time I want to use Dreamweaver I end up losing some hair. It's a frustrating piece of software if you know what you're doing or want to do and it won't let you.

    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 This is a good thing. Your designers SHOULD know the ins and outs of 80-90% of their code and tags.

    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 I doubt they hand code every story into the page. They have a template / publishing system for all articles / layouts. It's probably far, far faster to do it by hand then trying to wrap Dreamweaver into it.

    4. Dreamweaver allows preview easily and pretty much automates repeatable tasks. Handcoding requires a Mechanical Turk.
    Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 2 dual monitors, sshfs mounted file system and vim will do it far faster then Dreamweaver.. alt-tab works okay if you're stuck with one monitor.

    So its a tie. Nope, I would say hand-coding: 3.5 and Dreamweaver .5

    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. I would applaud them for not wasting your money on software licenses and doing the job correctly.

  2. Re:W3C by dave420 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The two are not mutually exclusive. It's perfectly possible to make even the most beautiful sites render accurately across all the major browsers and still contain perfectly valid markup. It smacks of being lazy, or just not knowing the importance of validating code.