One of the most important tools within web developer’s arsenal is the text editor.
It is a widely recognised and adopted convention among standards compliant, semantic web developers not to use tools which auto-generate HTML or CSS code.
I would strongly recommend to anyone not to use Dreamweaver or FrontPage to develop web pages.
These tools tend to create code which is either one or all of the following:
- Non-standards compliant
- Unnecessarily bloated
- Not cross-browser compliant
- Will not be sufficient when it comes to integration into larger systems (with PHP, Java, CFM or .NET back ends)
Use a plain text editor which does not write code automatically for you. It is OK if the text editor you use auto-suggests code to be used, but it is not good if the tool automatically writes code for you during your development process as you will never be 100% sure on whether the code the tool is generating is the code you want in the final web site.
I have been misfortunate enough to use early versions of tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage and they have left such a sour taste in my mouth that I have (rightly so) made a decision never to go back to them again.
On a trial site I tried to build using Dreamweaver (probably somewhere around year 2001), the tool tended to inject so much unnecessary table related HTML that most of my time was spend taking out the code which the tool was putting in for me (even though I was in editor mode and not in visual design mode).
I got so annoyed with all this that I made a decision only to use straight, simple and free code editors, which only helped me with matters like code colouring, nice indentation, maybe some auto-suggestion and that’s it!
It has been one of the best development and process-related decisions I have ever made as a web developer.
If you are not able to write ‘hand coded’ HTML/CSS, then you really need to learn how to do it.
It is one of the big ways in which professionals are differentiated from amateurs within the industry and this is reflected within good web developer job ads, which will usually specify that ‘hand coding’ is an apsolute requirement.