At 4/12/2007 08:48 AM, Chetan Graham wrote:
WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'
Vonda McIntyre used to describe the three stages in the evolution of
science fiction. In the first stage it was all about the technology,
the new gadgets we could dream up; "Look at this cool space ship we
built!" In the second stage, writers had accepted the wonders of the
new technology and started describing what you could do with it:
"Look where we can go in our space ship!" And the third stage, the
one that flowered in the 1960s and 70s when Viet Nam and LSD and
feminism turned science fiction inside out, we were writing about how
the technology and our use of it transforms those who use it: "Who do
we become after a thousand years of FTL space travel?"
I can see a similar progression in any technology including computer
use: from the early gear-smiths to the Univac tube-jockeys to the
make-it-yourself Atari hounds to the code-it-yourself programmers to
the mavens of Web 2.0... at each stage there's less preoccupation
with yesterday's core work; we take those parts for granted and focus
on how far they can take us tomorrow.
Like you, I grew up coding by hand -- not coding in binary machine
language on punch cards as my older brother did in the early 60s at
Columbia, but I cut my programming teeth in the early 80s on BASIC
and Z-80 Assembler and PL/M. I remember being appalled when I wrote
my first disassembler and looked under the hood at the machine code
produced by the PL/M compiler: it was so incredibly inefficient! The
lower-level the language, the more crucial each instruction
seems. These days my languages of preference are PHP, CSS, HTML, and
JavaScript. Any one instructional unit in these scripts surely
results in thousands or millions of machine instructions. I used to
stipple each dot; now I paint in broad strokes. I have stopped
worrying about the low level so much -- to whom does it really matter
which is more efficient, foreach() or while(), if you're not
executing tens of thousands of them in a single script? -- instead
focusing on the much bigger pictures of interface design, application
design, security, interoperability, and user friendliness.
So I don't blame the newcomers for caring less about the nitty gritty
details under the hood -- we're all that way. You obviously care
about how clean your PHP code is, but how much do you care about how
clean the machine code is that actually executes when your script
hits the interpreter? You probably don't. It's not in your field of
vision. You're looking up, and ahead.
I've never used a WYSIWYG HTML editor -- my test drives of many
editors have produced such gawdawful markup that I happily continue
to code by hand, quickly and well. However I have been told by many
people that Dreamweaver can be set up to produce lean, clean
XHTML. I suspect that the way to do it is to turn off nearly all of
its "intelligence." Like most of the Microsoft applications, its
attempts to second-guess our intentions result in garbage out. Those
apps were apparently build by well-meaning programmers whose mandate
was to care more about the appearance of what you see than the
quality of what you get.
...Now that I've had my say... and as dear as this topic is to my
heart... it's really off-topic for this list. I'd recommend WD-L
http://webdesign-L.com/
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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