Re: HTML editor: does everyone need to be on the same page?

[Tom Murrell <trmurrell -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Much has been made about whether or not one can produce "good code" (whatever
that is) with a WYSIWYG HTML editor. Specifically, some in this thread have
questioned the utility of Microsoft FrontPage as far as the "quality" of its
code is concerned. I would like to provide a real world example of how I use
FrontPage 2000 AND a non-WYSIWYG editor to produce code that validates both to
XHTML 1.0 and to WAI standards.

I simply use the option to open a page I want to work in with the editor I want
to use, in this case the free HTML editor available from W3C called "HTML Kit."
The document management aspects of FP 2K still work, and the code I produce, in
our current situation XHTML 1.0 Strict or Transitional, validates. Nor does
FrontPage produce extraneous code. Moreover, Html Kit allows me to 'clean up'
code produced by FrontPage so that it will also be conforming.

Another writer in our group has used NotePad in the same way that I've used Kit
and produced acceptable results, that is results that validate.

As far as the FrontPage Editor producing less than desireable code, I'm not
sure what people mean. Are you referring to the <meta> tags that identify the
editor as FrontPage? If so, well I don't consider that a bad thing; plus those
tags are easily editable.

I will admit that there are a couple of easily identifiable coding glitches
that FP creates when it opens one of my validated documents in its own editor,
but those are usually easily fixed once you know what to look for. But
generally we've stopped using the FrontPage Editor and just use it as a
document manager and interface with our server software for publishing and
mapping the site.

I have no reason to be a fanatic supporter of things Microsoft, but I feel we
are able to produce quite respectable code that meets industry-wide standards
(that I wish more people and site would adopt) loads acceptably on a
company-wide intranet serving an international organization. And we do it with
a "standardized" tool that, I would point out, allows for some developer
flexibility while allowing us to minimize the overhead associated with
publishing and maintaining a variety of web sites and a variety of developers
in geographically diverse environments.

=====
Tom Murrell
Lead Technical Writer
Alliance Data Systems
Columbus, Ohio
mailto:tmurrell -at- columbus -dot- rr -dot- com
Personal Web Page - http://home.columbus.rr.com/murrell/
Page Last Updated 07/15/01

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