Why I Compose HTML Source Directly
"My mind is my center and everything that happens there is my
responsibility."
Dirk Gently
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
by Douglas Adams
Visual HTML editors are great to use when you're composing a small
page, and you want it to look a certain way, and you never want to
look at the HTML source. However, such editors tend to work like
visual word processors, in that they save lots of crap into the source
file that doesn't really have any function. When I save a document,
and have to look at the source file, it makes me very cranky to see
tags that reset the font every sentence, and proclaim what editor was
used to compose that file, and all sorts of other irritating
non-functional things.
Therefore, since I'm a programmer, and I'm used to typing and looking
at obscure sytax and text, I just compose the HTML by hand. It adds a
little bit of overhead, I suppose, but when I want to tweak something,
I know exactly where it is and how to do it.
To most people, I expect, this doesn't make any sense, and why don't I
do it the "easy" way. Well, this is how I choose to do it, because it
makes sense to the way my mind works.
