Why not wysiwyg

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Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 6 months ago. Active 11 years, 6 months ago. Viewed 1k times. Derick K. It's just doing what you already know in a few less clicks. DA I see it like this: If you can drive a manual car, then getting into an automatic and driving away is easy, but if you only know how to drive an automatic Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Mathew Mathew 7, 6 6 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 56 56 bronze badges.

Man everything is good except for Dreamweaver isn't great for auto-completion, I been working with visual studio IDE and Dreamweaver for more than 10 years, and for sure you can make really complex thing with both of them and separatly. Indeed Dreamweaver for me is better in html completion than visual studio.

What got me to switch over to almost completely hand-coding my markup, though, was the use of CMSs whose various templating systems make working with a WYSIWYG effectively useless; and the need of having full control over every aspect of the markup - for optimization, dealing with cross-browser quirks, usability and such.

Pekka Pekka k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Good points. I used to work with a CMS using FCKEditor and saw a lot of frustration from users who did not understand why it did not work the same as Word often because in a nested tag situation it applied formatting in a way that made some sense at the tag level but seemed counter intuitive to the tag unaware users.

Are the desktop WYSIWYGS better in that respect or at some stage do they all degenerate into a bit of a mess of tags that need to be fixed up manually? Although CKEditor FCKEditor's successor seems to be more stable and reliable, the basic problems you describe persist, as they are inherent in thr browsers' rendering and editing engines. Even though basically, Word and other desktop programs work the same way The Word format is tag-based as well , they seem to be doing a better job - maybe because they already come with a decade or two of experience, blood, sweat, and tears.

True - I guess the web ones are still relatively new compared to their desktop counterparts and will get better with time. Ravi Vyas Ravi Vyas Armstrongest Armstrongest If the editor fails to make a change properly, the designer may not know how to edit the HTML manually to fix the error. The primary advantage of manual coding is that the designer has complete control over the HTML.

The primary disadvantage of manual coding is that the designer must save the document and load it in a web browser to see changes. Many web designers keep the text editor and web browser open at all times to reduce time required to save and view the altered documents. Why not just use a visual web editor? You design them visually on your computer using your mouse and keyboard, so that what you see in your computer monitor is what you get on your website.

They are an efficient and user-friendly method of making websites, since anybody, laypersons included, can create websites with these tools. No technical knowledge is needed. You can design your website quickly this way, and then devote your time and energy on what is really important to you: generating sales from your site, delivering your products or services, etc.

That way, your website doesn't become your life. It remains as what it should be: a means to an end, a way for you to sell stuff or whatever you want it for.

Visitors who write to me asking this question have usually encountered well-meaning friends who have advised them that it's really "better" to learn HTML. Let me address what is usually said about this matter. This may have been true in the s when the Internet was new, but it is no longer the case today for the major web editors. Sure, it's possible to get invalid code when using those editors if you deliberately insert invalid code which you import from some website.

But then, you will get invalid code if you do that when hand coding in HTML as well. In fact, with the state of sophistication of web editors today, there's a greater likelihood that you will create invalid HTML when writing HTML by hand, than by letting the web editor create it for you. Note that my statements above only apply to the editors I specifically mentioned. It doesn't necessarily to apply to all web editors in the known universe. I don't go around testing the code generated by every web editor, so I can't make a definitive statement about every web editor available today.

In fact, my examination of the code produced by the editors mentioned above shows that it's mostly the sort of code I would have produced had I written the code manually myself. Yes, there are situations where the code is a bit bigger than what I'd have written manually, but that's a far cry from "bloat".

And the extra code usually occurs because I want the web editor to take over some of the labour-intensive activities like automatically updating all the pages of my website when I change the overall site design from me. I consider such a trade-off, which allows me to save a huge amount of time, a fair one.

If you use a word processor like Microsoft Word to create a website , you will get a lot of code bloat. But to be fair to Word, it is not a web editor. It merely provides the facility to convert a document into a web page for convenience of its users.

It was never intended to be a proper web editor, nor does it pretend to be one. Let me put it this way. Even if the code generated by web editors are a few bytes bigger than what you can create yourself, it's probably worth it. It saves you the time you take hand coding the page, and attending to the nitty-gritty. It is analogous to your washing your clothes by using a washing machine and washing them by hand. Doing it by hand may lead to cleaner clothes, since you can pay special attention to specific stains you spot.

But for the most part, a washing machine is more than adequate. And you're freed to attend to more important things. And they save you time. Generally speaking, it all boils down to what you're creating a website for. Which is why I divided my answer in this way. If you are an incidental webmaster, where your site exists to serve a bigger goal, you'll probably find it frustrating if you are going to spend all your time learning HTML, just to build a website so that you can sell some product or service.

Like I said, it's like having to learn to build and repair a car, just so that you can drive it to go to work. Note that those friends that advise you to learn HTML aren't really wrong.