Hand-coding is not a thing of the past

Frontpage, Dreamweaver, GoLive, even Microsoft Word, have become the defacto standard tools of the trade for web designers today. These applications all claim “WYSIWYG” what you see is what you get. The fact is they are all “WYSICTWYG” what you see is close to what you get. When the pages created with these tools don’t perform exactly as intended the blame is placed squarely on the application. After all, it was the application that generated the code behind the page. And since that code is two miles long, don’t think for a minute that little quirk in the page display can be easily fixed. If that’s the application does it, then that’s the way the application does it.

My web page code is generated by keyboard, in Notepad. Notepad is the simple text editor that comes installed with all versions of Microsoft Windows. It doesn’t do anything on its own but accept keyboard input. That leaves me in complete control of what my page does. And I have no scapegoat when my page doesn’t display as intended. The only limitations are those imposed by the web technology being coded. HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS 1.0, CSS 2.0, XML, XSLT whatever the standard allows can be hand-coded in Notepad. And should be.