It’s Still a Stinking WYSIWYG
Posted on August 24, 2007 in Web | 3 Comments »
Just the other day, Eric Meyer announced that he has been working with WebAssist to create Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor. It’s a Dreamweaver Extension that assists users in creating clean markup and CSS. While this seems like a vast improvement over previous WYSIWYGs, it still feels like one.
Why Do I Feel This Way?
While it’s great that this would mean that there is less crap code out there, people are still basically using forms to generate the markup and CSS needed. They still are not learning anything about web development.
One thing I saw in the plans for future releases was:
There are some things I expect will be improved in future releases, like shorthand value minimization—the simplest example of that being a condensation of 0 0 0 0 down to just plain 0.”
Wow, if that’s not going to confuse the hell out of people who don’t know CSS, I don’t know what will. Imagine trying to add a margin in, so you add margin: 10px 0 10px 0;, then it gets condensed to margin: 10px 0;. It kind of seems like you would be confused as to why it wouldn’t accept the values that you were adding. Unless they give some sort of alert telling the user that this is what is happening, they will definitely be confused.
They won’t know the different between margin and padding.
They still may use blockquotes to indent their text.
It just seems like crap.
Users are still going to be choosing from a template. Do we really want the web to be built on templates?
What are the Ramifications
As I was thinking about this writing this, I was reading a post at entitled “Will Software Ever Make Us Redundant?”.
I think this post really got me thinking about how even though the WYSIWYGs are getting better, I don’t ever think that humans will become redundant in Web Design/Development. The human mind is just too creative and amazing for a piece of software to ever be able to accomplish the same thing. Think about all of those wacky IE6 bugs.
I don’t know Mr. Meyer, with all due respect, it kinda feels like you sold out on us.
Adrian TurnerAugust 25, 2007 at 1:36 am
I agree with you. Also, this product seems counter productive to the sale of his books. If you have one do you really need the other?
priscaAugust 27, 2007 at 11:07 am
well, I personally don’t use DW so I have not had a chance to test the CSS Sculptor myself and can’t really judge. But I feel that you are dismissing what is ultimately a tool to improve the code being published by DW - and that’s got to be good. Though I agree that as a webdesigner/developer you need to understand the code - not everyone will handcode - or ever be interested in that. So improving the WYSIWYG apps and generating better code must be better than trying to force people into learning something they don’t feel they need to (no matter how wrong they might be).
Eric Meyer contributing can only mean that this time around the implementation of this particular extension has been thought through and implemented correctly - nice clean code for everyone :)
And who knows - knowing that this code is correct might even get a few more people to venture further and curious about understanding the principles ;)
TrevorAugust 28, 2007 at 6:58 am
@prisca-well I guess I agree that the code will be better. I have not had a chance to test CSS Sculptor either, but I don’t think that I would pay for it to just try it out either. I also don’t know if people who are not knowledgeable about CSS and web standards would see the benefit in buying it either.
I guess I’m not totally sold that this WYSIWYG implementation is going to be leaps and bounds above others. But it’s a step, so I guess I can’t ask for more than that.