News & Views

The W3C, WSIWYG and Hand-Coding
Today, I thought that I would write a sister piece to my friend Daniel East's recent article <> on the plethora of browsers that are out there for end users to choose from. Dan wrote his piece from the view of the end user but I'd like to view the issue from the flip side, from that of the web designer or webmaster.

The W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the body that oversees the standards that are used on the web. Or at least they try to. You see, browser coders occasionally take short cuts or, like in any profession, some are just plain lazy or lousy. As a result, the standards that The W3C recommends all browsers follow are either totally ignored or partially so. It ends up being like all the various plug formats in the 90's before the industry pretty much settled on USB and FireWire.

That's why when you go to the same site but in different browsers, you can can end up with two wildly different experiences. And it drives web designers insane. In fact, there is a grassroots movement quietly building among these designers to code strictly to W3C standards and place the responsibility of compliance squarely on the shoulders of the browser authors.

Hand-Coding
Old school. Count me in. It takes longer but you learn a lot more about how things work 'under the hood.' In fact, even if you use a WYSIWYG web coder, when you troubleshoot your design, you have to result to hand-coding. So either way you go, you're going to have to learn what makes a site tick.

In the early days, people used to code their sites using ordinary word processors. In fact, if you really know your stuff, you could code a whole site using just TextEdit. But the hand-coder of choice is BBEdit from Bare Bones Software. It comes with built-in task bars that can be customized in order to save time by automating some of your repetitive tasks.

WYSIWYG
New school. Has its own learning curve but, as the acronym implies, What You See Is What You Get. The advantages here are obvious - you immediately know what your output looks like, which can save you a lot of time. You can add links, drag-n-drop graphics and all manner of stuff in a single pane, also a bonus.

The two most popular tools of choice here are Dreamweaver and Adobe Go Live!. In fact, BBEdit has been set up to work hand-in-hand with Dreamweaver if you so choose. They're expensive but worth the price if you crank out sites for a living.

WSIWYG vs. Hand-Coding
As I have said already, WYSIWYG is great for laying out your site in a timely manner, but you're still have to roll up your sleeves and do a bit of hand-coding when it's time to troubleshoot. A lot of web designers have taken to using WYSIWYGs for the layout and roughing in and hand-coding for tightening things up.

The goal of every web designer is to keep their code to a minimum, as streamlined as possible. But each piece of software leaves you with varying results. I found a great example in an older HTML coding how-to book. A hand-coder was able to check part of a browser's capabilities with only eight lines of code. One WYSIWYG took one and a half pages to accomplish the same task while the other took even more.

Four years ago, that would have taxed your browser. Today, because of increasing speeds, you really don't notice it. But that only encourages sloppy coding, unfortunately. And makes for a really big problem for web designers.

In OS X, you'll note that a lot of the code is XML (eXtensible Markup Language). This will eventually replace HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It's much more efficient, but it is rigid. You can't get off easy with sloppy coding, either from the web designer or the browser author. We're also starting to see regularly CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The advantage to these is that a web designer, for example, could change the font face on every single page of a corporate website by changing the font-style assignation just on the CSS page. Every page on the site would see that the style has been changed and would accommodate accordingly, even if the site numbered in the hundreds of pages. Very efficient.
Unfortunately ...

Each browser seems to have its own tick. Be that it doesn't work well with JavaScripts or doesn't work with the latest version of CSS. Plus yu can customize your personal settings. So you can see, the web designer is fighting an uphill battle. That's why the grassroots movement of 'Damn the Browser' is getting a strong foothold. To code a page to accommodate each and every browser's nuances is for all purposes, impossible.

So, when you do choose your modern browser, as beg you as a web designer, try to pick one that adheres to as many of the rules as is possible.

And most of those are free.

=========================================
©2004 Frank Petrie, Freelance writer, Macsimum News contributor, SJAUG eCommunicator, Curmudgeon
Email: phranky@mac.com
iChat: phranky
AIM: phrankyw
Archiive: home.comcast.net/~phranky

=========================================
ATTRIBUTION INFORMATION: This article may be reprinted by any Macintosh User Group in their newsletter/publication distributed on paper or online, so long as credit is given to the author and publisher (Frank Petrie). Commercial or other publication is prohibited unless specific permission is granted by the author. Please notify author of placement and provide a copy/URL for reference. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.