Confessions of a former hand coder

Back in the day, before web editors, NotePad and WordPad were my best friends. I spent hours, literally, inserting every line break and paragraph break and religiously conformed to the standards set out in my HTML book - HTML 3.2. Somewhere along the line, I think I graduated to version 4, but I've always been more comfortable with 3.2, simply because tags get deprecated and added so quickly and the browser wars continue to this day (but not so bad as it was in Days of Yore). Hand coding was something really cool. It meant I could do something most people back in '97 couldn't do.

I'm not saying it was pretty, because those who have hand coded tables know that there is nothing easy about doing that. I think I had nightmares at the time of tds and trs, with the occasional th to stir things up. And at the time, I was constantly checking out the W3C, the standards organization before I realized that Microsoft and Netscape were simply paying Tim Berners-Lee and friends lip service and I'd still have to serve up two different pages for every one page in order to get my site to render properly. I still have horrors of writing the javascript necessary for browser detection - these days, I can do it easily, but in those days, I was still a wee one online and all of those semi-colons and brackets made my eyes bleed and I cursed Bill Gates (though, I did applaud Microsoft for deprecating the blink tag - thank you. Now if we could just get frames to go away...). I do still look at the W3C on occasion, but I no longer have to be anal-retentive about it, simply because I've sold my hand-coding soul over to Macromedia.

Life with Dreamweaver is, for the lack of a better word, a dream. My pages work (mostly) all of the time. I can set it up to use my favorite HTML version, 3.2 (because, at this point, most of 3.2 is accepted by the most recent browsers) and if I decide to go with funky javascript (which I don't, as now the only code I have is to avoid being "framed" and another little snippet that prevents my windows from being resized when the visitor is using Netscape and not IE), Dreamweaver lets me know which browsers my script is compatible with. So I no longer need to have 80 million different browsers on my computer - I simply use Netscape, occasionally view my site in IE, but usually Dreamweaver catches me if I do something that will render, say, maroon in a lovely puce color (it has happened). I used CSS at work (this site doesn't use CSS, due to browser incompatibility issues, sorry, Jemima) as we all used the same version of IE and I used to write those out as well and alignment used to make my head hurt. Dreamweaver does those for me too. And I use layers now. I could never code layers by hand (not that I tried, but it scares me to even try).

Every now and then, I still hand code. I'm not a hand coder, like say Jemima is, but if I need to, I can get in there and fix it. Dreamweaver is lovely, but every now and then it refuses to do what I command it to do and in that case, the only thing a girl can do is get into the Code Inspector and rewrite the HTML herself. The school computers in the masters' lab lack HTML editors - not even FrontPage Express (bah! Evil!) or Netscape Composer (only slightly less evil than FrontPage) - and so that's where I do most of my hand coding, if at all. These days we have to close tags that we once would have left open because the browsers would have rendered them okay anyway, so inserting paragraphs now takes forever and a day on a 50 or 60 page story. Back in the day when I used to host other people's work on my site, I used to spend a good chunk of every Saturday not only reading the submissions but also hand coding them until I thought my fingers would fall off.

So while I respect the hand coding warriors and was proud to be a member of them at one time (to the point that I actually had a "proud hand coder" button on my site), I can't deny the quickness Dreamweaver provides me in updating, how it auto-updates all of my links for me, dynamically changes consistent parts of my site when I change just one little thing - it's beautiful. The site is over 400 pages now, so it's impossible to keep track of what is where. For that reason, I have to confess, I've gone over to the dark side and given up the proud, true ways of hand coding.