Today I spent all day at work labouriously going over the so called xhtml that Macromedia Dreamweaver produces. Every page produced by my colleague had to be checked and cleaned, then tested in Opera and Mozilla. Mostly I was removing unnecessary and invalid mark-up, and fixing errors that IE ignores, but sane browser react too.
I didn't touch his many-nested-table designs, but in sections of the site that come out of Perl/XSLT, I re-wrote his mark-up from the ground up in clean modern xhtml, with clean cascading style-sheets, rather than the multitude of tables and "one style rule per object on the page" approach of Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver, FrontPage et al. have two obvious problems:
These GUI tools may be good for rapid prototyping by visual designers, but they are lousy if you want your pages to be tight and correct.
Re:one word
ajt on 2004-03-20T11:19:23
A good site indeed. However, I still need to wean the designer of his Dreamweaver addiction... Examples of good design don't seem to work.
The problem is, he is busy and rushed, and mangelment doesn't give him enough time to learn and experiment, so when they say "make it blue", and have it done by yesterday, it's easier to use a quick-and-dirty tool like Dreamweaver, than it is, to do it properly.
I build my pages two ways: at home for fun; and programatically via Perl/XSLT at work. At home I have the time and inclination to learn, and at work I need my designs to be clean, otherwise it's almost impossible to make the pages work.
