Re: GUI vs Hand, Was: estimating the cost of building a web site

[Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- jci -dot- com]

>Changing that is easier in a t
>ext editor than in a WYSIWYG tool. I can change a color on a site that has
>hundreds of pages by editing one configuration file and not relying on CSS
>to do it.  Open one file, change $table_header_cell_bg = c3c3c3 to a
>different color in one quick entry.

There's a lot of different ways to do that without CSS, as well. (Which is
good, at least for Mac users, as there's a rebellion going on there against
bloatware so a lot of them are switching to iCab, a smaller browser which
doesn't do style sheets at all.) Most good tools have what's known as "site
styles" or something similar. Simply change that and you've changed it in
every file in the site. No muss, no fuss, and only optionally CSS.

One of the tools I've used, Fusion, even allowed me to change the
appearance of every button and banner on every page with a couple of mouse
clicks (including customizing each with a reference to the page involved,
page title for the banner and short form of the title for the button). I
could do something similar with perl and the GIMP, as I understand, but
I've never tried that.

Once, on a site built with GoLive, things changed (surprise!) and a section
that was originally planned to be small took on major significance, so
links had to be rearranged. GoLive allowed me to simply drag the
destination of every link on the site that pointed to page A over to page B
with one drag; the links on the pages were all updated automatically.

As for your vs John's quote: If I'm speaking to those who are just starting
out in web design, I would definitely affirm John's quote over yours. While
knowing HTML is vital, starting out in this business as a hand-coder is, I
think, irresponsible. To pull an analogy out of a previous life, it's like
walking into a shop that's knee-deep in CASE, UML, and the like, and
insisting on writing everything in assembler language. What you manage to
get done will perhaps run faster than the others, but there won't be all
that much of it.

My own personal opinion is that his quote even applies to experienced
dinosaurs like us, but I realize that there's a lot of room for argument on
that point. I do know I'm faster now than I *ever* was with hand-coding. Am
I faster than you? Don't know and don't care. The point is not whether it
makes one designer faster than another, but rather that it makes any
designer faster than before. I think it does (this is, of course, after the
initial drop caused by the learning curve associated with *any* change in
work style). You think it doesn't. I don't think the question admits to
empirical solution. Either opinion and 60 cents will get you a can of
Mountain Dew from the machine down the hall.

My gut feel for it is the closer one sticks to plain vanilla sites (little
or no layout, basic javascript, etc.) the more able a hand-coder is to keep
up with a tool user. But the more complex and media-rich the site is, the
harder that will be.

And, Nielsen, Spool, et al., notwithstanding, that's the direction the web
is going. People are wanting more interactivity from their web sites.
Simple little pages that just sit there and look pretty are on the
endangered list. People want pages that actively assist them in doing what
they need to do. (Note that caveat, please, those of you who are about to
lecture me about badly-designed bells and whistles. Bad design is bad
design; just as interactivity can amplify a good design and make it great,
it can also amplify a mediocre design and make it horrible.) The question
is one of how fast the change will happen, not whether.


Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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