[ale] Creating a website (semi-rant)

[David Tomaschik]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at 34thprs.org> wrote:
> Hand coder here.  Used to work with a free institutional copy of WsFTP,
> Notepad and CorelXara in the mid-90's.  Then moved to CorelDraw8 and
> eventually 10.  (Yes, I know it's not FLOSS but Corel did release a FLOSS
> solution!)
>
> Today I code on gedit and xfer files with gFTP and bareFTP and do use GIMP
> and Inkscape but still cling to my beloved Corel (work much faster
> there...too many years experience).  Corel Corporation did have a foray into
> *NIX with their own distro about 10-years ago.  CorelLinux was Debian based
> and included a FLOSS version of Photopaint 8.  It wasn't the most up-to-date
> version of the software but it was good stuff and something I wish I still
> had my copy of!  (Too bad they ditched the distro...)  I had troubles trying
> to run it on my hardware and was way too young in my IT life to grasp it on
> my own.
>
> I used to teach HTML 4.0 at New Horizons of Washington, DC as well as
> Dreamweaver and Frontpage.  Hate the WYSIWYG editors as they just aren't
> worth the effort (IMNSHO) and as such are something that I have avoided
> completely.  I have managed web teams that developed portal level sites and
> used WYSIWYG tools, but in the end we always worked in raw code.
>
> Mark-up languages are too easy to learn to try avoid; so please forgive me
> if I'm chiming in on a wrong note, but I would just learn them, hand-code
> and learn the fundamentals of doing graphics.  I have taught several
> webmasters the tools of the trade and if I can do it; anyone can...
>
> PS>  The only thing I use MS product for in my personal life is this:
> Silverlight on Firefox for Netflix, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and CorelDraw 10 and
> all of that on a XP VM running on 11.04.

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?

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.

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).

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.

-- 
David Tomaschik, RHCE, LPIC-1
System Administrator/Open Source Advocate
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com