As I continue to hack my way through an attempt to blend my website with a new WordPress-Powered “True” Blog (as opposed to my current non-Blog, or false-Blog,  which is really an Articles section only calling itself a blog because ‘blog’ is currently more trendy of a term than ‘articles’), I find it necessary to throw up a few very quick blog posts for testing purposes. As usual for me, I am once again backing my way into the code from the design…

No, I am not the best “coder” around, or even a coder at all. I consider myself, first and foremost, a graphic designer. I am backing my way into understanding code and the coding process. However, I find it unproductive and unnecessary in my transition from being mostly a (print-based) graphic designer to a web designer and developer to memorize coding languages—at least not up front and all at once. Memorization has never been a strength of mine. Thank goodness for the internet—that CSS property that my mind refuses to memorize is hiding in the Google Search Bar at the top right of my browser window. Three seconds, maybe less, and I  have copied the property I need from W3schools, and I am done. I am not just a code memorization-machine.

Sure, with repeated, continuous use of  code, be it html, CSS, PHP, or whichever, anyone, including myself, will memorize more and more aspects of the code. This has happened with me. The point I am making is that the memorization of a scripting language is not the first and foremost priority for me.

I guess it is the old graphic artist in me but, for example, I could care less what the code of a .PSD or a postscript file or a .PDF file looks like. I do not care if said code that makes up the file could be optimized better, or made to look more pretty, or was “standards compliant.” You do not care about the code in those 3 types of files either. Why do we not care about the code? We do not care about the code of a .PSD file because we do not have to! We can safely rely on Adobe’s Photoshop or many other similar applications to output a perfect, or perfect enough, .psd file.

Here come the coders to scream “static image files are one thing, but a dynamic website is an entirely different beast.”

What about .PDF files? Today’s Portable Document File format has the ability to do things that rival websites or web apps when it comes to user-interaction and being dynamic. Is this my cryptic defense of WYSIWYG web design apps? Sort of, but not really. All the current WYSIWYG are terrible. Only Dreamweaver is to be considered usable.

However, I sure do wish a WYSIWYG web design app would finally make the large leap, and allow a GUI interface for effectively designing websites. When you can actually get the GUI part of Dreamweaver to do what you want for the website or web app you are working on, the code it spits out is getting closer to being “hand-coder” perfect, and standards-compliant. The problem with Dreamweaver is that it is only half way there in terms of implementing itself as a great code-generator. Hopefully it gets all the way there. I wont hold my breath, though. By the time Adobe makes Dreamweaver as user-friendly as InDesign is, I will have already picked up enough hand-coding skills to consider myself a code-snob.

Many of the tasks that are part of building websites today are still slowly accomplished with a “hand-coded” solution, when, if Adobe or Microsoft would get their act together, the task could be accomplished with a couple of button pushes.

Remembering back to the old days, circa 1993, when Adobe, et al were in the infancy of technologies like “postscript,” someone in the design shop had an oddly-corrupted “postscript” file that the “smart guy” at the pre-press house had to dig into the actual code of the file to get it to output correctly. I spent the next 10 years working in graphic design shops without ever having a pre-press technician have to mess with the “code”  for a post script file. Nor was there any pride in being able to “work the code” of a postscript file, more just a general inconvenience someone had to deal with.

The lesson here is that yesterday’s postscript file is todays html, css, or php file.  If the technology companies wanted to make it easier for non-pure-coders to design intricate websites, with all the bells and whistles, It surely could be done.

Now the pure-coders scream “get iWeb or Dreamweaver.”

iWeb is not strong enough. I have and use Dreamweaver. I actually spend more time in the “code-view” of Dreamweaver’s split-view than the “design-view”—not that I want to, but it seems I have to. Imagine if today one needed a “code-view” for Adobe Photoshop files—it would be like 1993 all over again!

</rant>