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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.'"
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
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").
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?
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
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.
That's not coding by hand, that's compiling by hand ;-p.
Overhead at an outsourcing facility:
Hand-coding agent: I hate this guy, he's refreshing his browser every minute on the same news. I can't keep up.
Hand-coding supervisor: PrintScreen it!
Hand-conding agent: Brilliant!
No Way! If they coded it with emacs, the average reader wouldn't know what 12 keys to hit simultaneously to get to the story.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Please refrain from alluding to such explicit language. For goodness sakes, Slashdot is not the Netherlands after 9 PM.
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!
I hear they have people who hand-write the news stories: sentence by sentence, word by word. Can you imagine?
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.
How I wish that was true.
It's the case for almost any *large* dynamic website, but having spent a couple of years doing web development in the design industry, I can tell you that at least in the UK, a large proportion of the small agencies are using Dreamweaver for most things.
Fuck knows why - I'd rather be handed an Illustrator file and turn it into HTML then have the crap that Dreamweaver spits out given to me, and have to try and turn it into something dynamic.