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

["J. Wynia" <jwynia -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

>Bad example. I can be up and running legally on DreamWeaver on any site
>within 30 minutes of getting my hands on the PC (and that's allowing for
>lots of waiting).

Oops. Indeed a bad example.

>
>Really, this is one of those religious wars that no one's going to change
>their mind on. If you're used to using a tool, you already have workarounds
>for all the problems the tool carries with it.

Which is exactly why I crafted my response statement the way I did. Don't
exclude any method which can bring the project in on time, under budget and
maintainable. Mr. Posada started out by tossing out the method I use.

>I used to hand-code a lot. Now I rarely do. My time is too valuable to
>waste on doing that.

It's a waste for YOU. MY time is too valuable to mess around with machine
generated HTML. But as long as what both methods produce are acceptable in a
browser and whoever has to maintain them is able to, and both can be done in
a reasonable amount of time, who cares which method you use?

>I rough in with a tool, then smooth over the code
>using perl or something similar. I find this approach takes me far less
>time, especially in the early stages of a design, when I don't know what's
>going to go where. I can "blue sky" a dozen different looks in the time it
>used to take me to do one.

See, I do most of my "blue sky" stuff on paper before ever touching the
keyboard. As far as prototyping any layout I see on paper, it only takes a
few minutes to an hour to match it if I have graphics, etc. to plug in as
space holders. My prototypes are done just as quickly as anyone I've seen
try to create the same thing in a WYSIWYG tool.

>Plus, if the client gets a brainstorm and wants to change the file
>structure in the middle of the job (yes, this *has* happened) it's far
>easier to change it with a decent tool than it is with a text editor.

Which is why the sites I'm currently working on are done with PHP. My
structures are kept seperate from my content. 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.

My statement again:
"In light of widely varying capabilities in web-related tools, it is not
fiscally responsible to exclude any method of coding web pages which is
efficient given the results."