To WYSIWYG or not to WYSIWYG?

Let us turn the clocks back a little. Back to when I first began coding Web pages. I started out as a “weekend Webby” surfing the Net and curious as to how the pages were put together. I didn't have to go out of my way to learn either. I had it all at my finger tips on the very thing I was curious about. The Web. A couple of searches later (without the use of the now popular Google) I had a site book marked that would teach me to code basic Web sites. Basic being the important word.

I would come home from my regular sales job, switch on my overly expensive PC and teach myself code. At that time, I didn't have access to a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), so I made use of Notepad. Nothing spectacular and I was guilty of animated Gif page poisoning and non-compliant code, but at least I was beginning to build something I thought was...well...cool.

We'll wind the clock forward a little, to when my coding skills had improved and I was offered my first job opportunity with a company promising a career and a nice salary. A company that was a client of my earlier attempts at running my own business offered me a full-time position doing what I love the most. Building Web sites. However, rather than just simple sites, they wanted e-commerce. A big step up, but I had help.

The company had just purchased a copy of Macromedia's Drumbeat, an e-commerce WYSIWYG with database capability. Part of my terms of employment was to sit down and learn this software inside and out. Within a month, I was now producing sites that were linked to Microsoft Access, SQL Server and Borland databases. From simple HTML to ASP in one quick step. But at what cost?

Drumbeat was a powerful tool except for one thing. The code it produced. First of all, the HTML was anything but compliant. A fellow coder and avid Mac user hated what I was producing due to the way the Web pages were being displayed on a Mac platform. He saved my life on that aspect and in truth if it wasn't for him, I'd be still in sales right about now. Secondly, Drumbeat had a knack of creating lines and lines of irrelevant ASP code, which resulted in oversized include files. My sites were anything but fast loading.

And so begins the next learning curve. I would use Drumbeat to create the basics. Input pages, search facilities, displays, etc. Then I would modify the HTML by hand to make it W3C compliant. Needless to say, my fellow coder was delighted to see the sites display correctly on his Mac. After all, he was the lead designer. I was just the nuts and bolts guy.

The next step was to modify the ASP. Not an easy task for a beginner. Trial and error helped and before long, I was comfortable with modifying the generated ASP code and even began writing my own scripts.

This experience allowed me to view the place of WYSIWYGs and used correctly, they can be a valuable tool. A coder can save time and more importantly, keep the client costs lower as a result of quick project turn around. Used incorrectly, and you have a site that is not cross platform compatible or worse, slow and clunky.

Drumbeat slowly faded (I still own a copy to this day and I have used it on more than one occasion) and Macromedia's Ultra Dev took the stage. A logical step for Macromedia. An integration of Drumbeat with Dreamweaver was only a matter of time all though in my mind, Dreamweaver is not as powerful as Drumbeat ever was.

Dreamweaver has improved immensely over the years with more compliant code (although still not one hundred percent) and dynamic extensions available for download to enhance the basic offerings.

So, to WYSIWYG or not to WYSIWYG?

I live in a World where I use them for speed and especially file handling. You can't beat Dreamweaver when it comes to moving files around or changing page names. But I'm not reliant on them either. As I said before, Dreamweaver is not yet one hundred percent compliant but it is certainly getting there. Web Designers need to know how to code correctly in order to get the most out of WYSIWYGs and also to ensure compatibility with surfer browser choice and operating systems.

Netscape 4.7 used to be the designers nightmare (well, for some anyway), with Safari now taking that slot. But things change all the time, new browsers are improving and designers need to continually adapt to these evolutions.

WYSIWYGs are here to stay and in my opinion are of great value. Those that use them need to lift the hood from time to time to see what makes them tick. If you trust a WYSIWYG one hundred percent of the time, it will bite you later on down the road.

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