[filmscanners] RE: Web home page writing software

["Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@ix.netcom.com>]

> From: Anthony Atkielski
>
> No, I've done lots of both, and they are like night and day.  Writing HTML
> isn't programming at all; it's writing pages of text with a couple of
> keywords inserted inside (to mark things that should be in bold, links to
> other pages, or whatever).  It is _very_ easy to learn, by design.

If all you want is pages of text with some minimal formatting, and the
occasional inline image, then manual HTML is fine. But look at most
professional web sites. They're full of nested tables, not to mention
frames, plus little fragments of javascript for special effects, hit
counters, etc. You can write that stuff if you want, but I wouldn't
recommend it to most people.

> The largest Web sites on the Internet are written mostly by hand in HTML.
> It's not difficult at all.  My own site is entirely hand-written.

Where did you get that idea? When I do a View Source on any major web site
(Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon), it's obviously not hand-coded. Many of the pages
are dynamically generated based on queries, cookies, etc. It may not be done
with something cheap like FrontPage, but when you see endless reams of
nested tables with no indenting, you know you're dealing with HTML that was
generated by software, not by hand.

> Bugs are very easy to avoid, since HTML is simple.  And browsers are very
> forgiving of HTML errors; even a page filled with errors can still display
> quite nicely.

Not erroneous links. And if you are doing something like a photo album by
hand, you have to make sure that you create all the thumbnail images by
hand, given them names related to the image names, and make sure that none
of your HREFs are misspelled. If you use an automatic tool, you wind up with
HTML that's guaranteed to be correct.

> You'll spend more time learning to use your web-design software than it
> would take to learn HTML, and you'll additionally be locked into
> using that
> web-design software forever, unless you want to repeat the time and money
> investment to learn some other software.
>
> HTML is very easy to write.  Unfortunately, this reality seems to be a
> well-kept secret--most people assume HTML is too difficult to
> write by hand,
> and so they never investigate it and never discover how easy and
> cheap it is
> to write it all yourself.

Well, I don't want to get into a flame war with you. You think what you
think, and you're free to do what you do. I do know HTML, and have created
simple web sites with text editors. And I think your recommendations are
lousy advice for someone else who wants to create anything beyond a very
basic web site with very few links, the simplest page layout, and no dynamic
content. Everyone else is free to judge which one of us is right.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com

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