Ask Slashdot: Value of Website Design Tools vs. Hand Coding?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @02:23AM from the pre-built-motherboards-are-for-wimps dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am pretty computer literate, and have a son who is extremely computer savvy. He taught himself C#, Javascript, built his own desktop with his Christmas and birthday money two years ago and is an avid reader of stackoverflow, reddit and many forums. He recently was asked to design a website for an architect, and likes to code by hand using Notepad++ and the Chrome developer tools. He uses CSS and Javascript libraries, but is convinced that all visual editors (Dreamweaver, Expression Web and so on) are only for extreme beginners and create non responsive, non compliant sites. I argue with him that while handcoding abilities are essential and great there is a value in knowing and using WYSIWYG editors. We agreed that having slashdot weigh in would be useful — comments appreciated on either the approach or good tools he can and should use."

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Clean Up by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-24 02:27 · Score: 5, Interesting

My experience with WYSIWYG editors mostly consists of having to come back after and maintain the site. It has invariably been a mess. Half of my effort is spent organizing the code before I can work with it. I'm sure a graphical editor can be written to create clean code, but I've yet to see one. Then again, many developers create the same kind of problems when coding by hand...