Re: FW: html editor questions--Oh shoot, I forgot something

[Arlen P Walker <Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM>]

I see the HTML Editor War is still as hot as ever. Depressing,
isn't it?

>What do you mean by Dreamweaver being "clunky"? From the way
>everyone on this list talks, it's like manna from heaven. . .

Manna? No, but I still prefer it to any other WYSIWYG editor. A lot
cleaner code than most of them, and easier to use than any of them.
It also ships with a good text editor for those tasks you want to
handle yourself, and it doesn't muck about with the code after you're
finished with it.

>Also, has anyone out there tried GoLive Studio? Impressions?

I've done GoLive CyberStudio. It's much better at site management
than DW, and almost as good an editor.

My current tool of choice is Fusion. Is it perfect? Nope, there are several
issues I have with it, but most of them are of the workstyle variety (it
wants to do things differently than I've grown accustomed to doing) and the
others are easily worked around. (No, I don't like working around my tools
any more than the next person, but at the moment the only choice I have
is between workarounds; nothing works as well as I'd like it to.) Fusion
achieves the best balance of site-management and editor features for my
purposes. And that's the bottom line, isn't it? I'll trade a few clunks in
the editor for the ability to make site-wide design changes with one click
of the mouse.

For those worried about download times: Grab a watch with a second hand
and sit down to a machine connected to a 28.8 modem. Watch the elapsed
time from the moment you click the link to the moment the page is done.
Do that with both the hand-optimized and the tool-generated page. A
difference of more than 10 seconds means you'll lose visitors (AKA customers)
going with the slower one. (Jakob Nielsen claims that people now will click
away if your site doesn't load within 15 seconds. I'm not sure if I quite
agree with that, but judging from my own behavior, it's hard to argue with.

NB: Longer download times are not the only penalty for superfluous tags.
Every tag has to be processed by the browser as well, which is more overhead,
and some tags result in longer delays than others. Time it on a couple of
browsers and see for yourself.

Something to think about when balancing tuning time vs downloading/viewing
time: If I take as long as an extra 8 hours to tune a page so it downloads
and displays 10 seconds faster, it takes precisely 2880 visits for the time
I spent to be offset by the time I've saved my customers. Less than one month
for a page with 100 hits/day; some web sites would hit the break-even point
in a matter of hours.

And one final consideration: some website hosting services levy a charge
per byte served (usually it's based on x dollars for a fixed amount,
then y dollars per KB or MB beyond that, though I've heard about one
who simply "shuts off" your site after x bytes downloaded, re-enabling
your site after the next time period begins). This means extra tags in a
page could cost you or your clients money, as well.


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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