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Web Page Design Layout Article
Is it wise and accepted to use HTML editors in your web design efforts? The
plain answer to this question is yes and no!
As all web design professional agree, there are pros and cons. The purists argue
that only hand coded web pages are the best for your web design while some
others do not even know how to write a single line of code but still manages to
come up with excellent web designs using HTML editors.
What You See Isn't Always What You Get.
Using an HTML editor is actually a matter of personal preference in your web
design methods. But knowing a bit of coding will certainly improve the quality
of your final out put on the web design.
When you use a visual HTML editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, they tell
you that WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. This means that, in theory, what
you see while you're editing the page should look just like what you get when
you're done. While word processors have pretty much got the concept working now
when it comes to printing (it didn't used to be as reliable), there are still
problems when it comes to HTML editors and web browsers – of course, if you've
spent more than five minutes using visual HTML editors, then you'll know that.
The Advantages and disadvantages of WYSIWYG.
WYSIWYG is quite uncontroversial at this point – its advantages are clear, in
that it lets you make your page look exactly the way you want it to while you're
writing it, with no surprises. In the early days, it was sometimes referred to
as being like a kind of 'interactive print preview'. Professional typesetters
were at first opposed to its use in publishing, but it's easy and quick enough
that it has come to dominate. The alternative now, though, is to go back to the
days of layout commands, which isn't something most users want to do.
On the web, WYSIWY it can be far more problematic, because what comes out of the
other end of the program isn't a static, printed page – it's computer code,
HTML, that has to be interpreted by a web browser before it becomes anything
viewable.
Not Even All Browsers are the Same.
The first problem with what you see in an editor being what you get in a browser
is that all the different browsers available don't always make the same page
look the same way. How are HTML editors supposed to account for bugs in Internet
Explorer? They can't, really.
This is one problem you have to surmount in your web design process. Different
browsers displays your web page in different ways.
So some knowledge of HTML will help you in correcting the errors in code. And
this will go far away in making your web design superb.
Each piece of HTML editing software is forced to either write its own HTML
rendering engine (the engine that decides how the code is translated to a
visible page), or use one from an existing program. Recently, for example,
Dreamweaver moved over to Opera's engine, which means that it shows pages the
way Opera does. FrontPage has always been closest to Internet Explorer. Because
Mozilla is open source, there are a lot of HTML editors based on its engine, the
most usable of which is Nvu.
That doesn't exactly help, though, when it comes to things looking the same in
every browser – if you use Dreamweaver, for example, what you see will be what
you get in Opera, but not necessarily in Internet Explorer. This is a problem
that can be partially solved by testing everything in every browser, but doing
that doesn't let you see what your page is going to look like as you're going
along.
Now another problem arises with your web design. What if the tests showed
different views of the page? How can you correct this with your web design
software?
Well! The software cannot correct it. You need to correct it by hand and hence
your web design must have personal touch too.
Maybe What You See Shouldn't Be What You Get.
While users demand WYSIWYG software, it's somewhat misguided when it comes to
the web, for the simple reason that it expects everyone to be using your site
the same way, and designs towards that expected use. In reality, the web was
designed to be a document format that was interpreted by the program receiving
it, meaning that if a browser wants to leave out all the graphics, or ignore all
your tables, then it's perfectly justified in doing so. This is especially
significant when it comes to mobile browsers – they simply don't have large
enough screens to display normal web design patterns, and it's silly to force
them to try.
Realizing this is one of the most important differences between being a good
designer and being a bad one. Bad designers will be constantly nudging at their
designs, doing everything they can think of to get them to look exactly the way
they intended in every browser possible, even if it doubles the size and
complexity of the code. A good designer will write good code that displays in
all browsers, but doesn't necessarily have to be pixel-perfect.
So the conclusion is that your web design must include both hand coding and HTML
editors for a fine website. Hope you enjoyed this article on web design. Browse
for more around this site.
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