Do Web Site Creators Need to Know (X)HTML?
Monday, September 3rd, 2007Do you make web sites? Do you know (X)HTML? I had to ask this question after spending the past few hours wading through some code that I did not create. That’s probably the most infuriating and time-consuming thing that any web developer ever does.
I’ve never used Dreamweaver, and I doubt that I ever will. For one thing, I don’t think they make a version that will run on Linux, but that’s beside the point. I suppose that in the hands of someone who truly knows what they’re doing, Dreamweaver can spit out some nice code. Unfortunately, I don’t think most people know what they’re doing.
Have you ever seen six sets of nested font tags, all containing the same information? I saw exactly that tonight. Obviously, the creator of these files did not know much (if anything) about the code that underlies the pages that so many of us traverse day after day. Was it the operator’s fault, or the software’s? How on earth can a program actually interpret code like that as a proper thing to write to a file?
I hope that this was code from an older version of Dreamweaver. I really do hope that’s the case, and that the more recent versions can tell the difference between necessary code and reams of fat that should be cut. The nested tables and cells containing only non-breaking spaces were bad enough, but so much of the code was simply garbage that did nothing but eat up bandwidth.
Please, I implore you; if you want to make web sites in any capacity, learn (X)HTML. I don’t care if you want to use a WYSIWYG editor, but make sure you can look at the resulting code afterward and know what it does. Make sure you know what mistakes the software has made so that you can correct them. If you do, in the end you will save time, you will save storage space, you will save bandwidth, etc. Those things add up to money in several ways, and who doesn’t like to save a buck or two?
