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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