I hand-code with the able assistance of PageSpinner. Its include thingies are very useful. I use TexEdit for CSS, because I don’t like StyleSpinner (though I haven’t tried the new version).

I’ve quit doing table-based layout and switched to pure CSS, Netscape 4 be damned. Took me a good long time to grok the box model, so I borrowed style sheets from the lovely and talented Zeldman and his pals. Then one evening, I was playing around and realized I’d not only written a box style sheet from scratch, but it didn’t even look like an abortion!

CSS and standards-compliant browsers open up a whole world of possibilities that just can’t be done with tables. Eric Meyer has a page with a bunch of nifty examples (and some stupid CSS tricks).

If you’re interested in learning about it, the New York Public Library has a nice   style guide that can get you started. Yeah, Zeldman wrote it. Yeah, I’ve been drinkin’ the orange Kool-Aid for years. Sosumi!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Gina Dentata on 2002-01-23 16:37 ]</font>

(Does FrontPage even exist in Mac form? I hope not.)

There is a version of Frontpage 98 for the Mac.

However… I am of the firm belief that WYSIWYGs are a tool from the devil himself and don’t produce nearly the efficiency of code as I can in MS Notepad or BBEdit.

I do use Adobe Imageready for slicing up images and generating that stuff… but I usually go through and clean up that code too once I’m done.

_________________
—
“I’ve never known a musician that regretted being one.  Whatever else life gives you… music will never let you down.”
- Anon

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ERNesbitt on 2002-01-24 15:24 ]</font>

I don’t think that visual coding tools are evil incarnate. Used properly, they can have their place. It’s of benefit to have good knowledge of the underlying HTML, but the WYSIWYG programs have definitely come a long way.

I’ve edited PDF files by hand and can make them much more efficient by doing so. You’d be amazed by the cruft, duplication and needless code in your average PDF (but you never hear anyone complain about the state of “visual” PDF creators ).

On 2002-01-24 17:39, someToast wrote:
I’ve edited PDF files by hand and can make them much more efficient by doing so. You’d be amazed by the cruft, duplication and needless code in your average PDF…

Oh MAN, why did you have to tell me that?  I didn’t even realize you COULD edit PDFs by hand.  Now I already have one open in BBEdit and am poking around…

Thanks!

As long as the PDF wasn’t saved with compression, it’s just plain text in there for the world to see.

I put together a catalog site a couple years ago that needed to generate a PDF invoice that would be attached to an email to the customer so they’d have an easily printable record of their order. It also had to match the client’s existing invoice style. That’s when I learned of the Joy of PDF and also of some of the needless bulk in your basic “print as PDF” file.

Adobe has the specs available for download. It’s a pretty interesting language to tinker around in.

All the web pages I have ever created have been hand-coded (is that the term?) from scratch.  How many of you out there still practice such archaic methods like me?

Every website I ever made since teaching myself how way back in 1998 has been with either Notepad (back on my PC) or BBEdit Lite (now on my iBook).  I’ve dabbled with Dreamweaver, but that was a long time ago, and I couldn’t be bothered to learn a whole new way of doing something I was already very good at.  And now I need people to answer some questions I have, because searching for !DOCTYPE help using Google is, surprisingly enough, stupid.

-Simon.