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Good questions and will answer them as follows:<BR>
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On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 09:11 -0500, David Tomaschik wrote:<BR>
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Rich,
Saying "hand code" is great and all (and I've done it) but it doesn't
work for anything larger than a few pages, and there's more than one
reason why.
First, say you've hand coded a site with 50 pages and a Vice President
comes to you and says "we want a little blue bar with information
about product X at the top of every page." How do you add this to
every page? How do you remove it from every page when the CEO decides
it was a terrible idea?
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Server-side includes are a great way to add drop-in content that touch every page. This was our solution to just this problem. Insert a code widget that calls a common page and populate the widget with the page. We use this for site navigation, headers, footers anything that calls for one common piece to be used globally. This beings at planning and design phase for scalability and move accordingly.<BR>
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Secondly, how do non-techies edit content? At the university where I
work, we literally have dozens if not >100 people who produce content
for the web. Most of them are business managers, administrative
assistants, faculty members, or student assistants. We have one
webmaster and about 1.5 FTE supporting our CMS.
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I comment code in such a way that new content is pretty easily inserted. Even a non-techie will be come a techie (that is the point of this) so that they can be comfortable with the tools and how to interact with the platform. Again, I have trained more than one noob how to do this!<BR>
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Thirdly, people take shortcuts. When they hand code, they're gonna
get it looking right... on one browser on one platform. When we
develop themes for our CMS, we test across upwards of a dozen
browser/platform combinations, including both iOS and Android, Mac
(Chrome/Firefox/Safari), Linux (Chrome/Firefox), and Windows
(Chrome/Firefox/IE).
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Cross browser has been an issue from day one. Best way to learn it? Hand-code. Learn the quirks and how to design for it from the beginning. Use several browsers as test if not OSes in VMs.<BR>
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Now, I'm not advocating WYSIWYG editors ala Dreamweaver, but I also
think that hand coding is not a solution for even the small business
level. Content Management Systems let you structure content, manage
access to content, update content, and keep content with a consistent
look and feel.
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When I was a manager at Cox Radio Interactive we used Notepad for the most part (in the early days) and managed all the sites in this manner. Local webmasters were offered tools that we custom built so that they could update content...but it was still simple text based solutions. Our enterprise at that time was 68 portal level radio station websites and got done in three months start to finish, fully customized and on a skeleton staff. <BR>
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I've heard all of these arguements before and YES it can become too daunting on a VERY large scale site, but for most smaller sites it works just fine...RinL
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