Re: WYSIWYG vs. the 'power-user'

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On Apr 12, 2007, at 2:46 PM, Paul Novitski wrote:

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/


Very good points indeed. The only caveat is that a lot of times you need to get at the code that DW/PS produces, either to fix something that they can't handle, or to change something that (DW here) won't let you change.

Trying to sort out the messes that they create can make you old before your time.

Can't remember the last time I had to update the machine code because PHP wouldn't run properly... ;)

Ed

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