Way back in the dim, dark history of websites I started to make them. I wasn't very good at it at first, but nobody is and few people ever got to be exceptional. There just weren't many good ways to make websites look good at first, especially with the number of differences between browsers and at first there was no such thing as a WYSIWYG editor. I think, actually, Mozilla had a simpe editor but it wasn't particularly good for much more than very simple things.
Along came Dreamweaver. It was - supposedly - powerful and excellent. I got a copy for work. I hated it.
Here's how it changed my workflow: I used to code pages by hand in a simple text editor. But Dreamweaver allowed me to use a visual editor to almost make the web pages I wanted. After I made each one I needed to make changes by hand so I would wade through oceans of pointless, confusing and distracting gibberish and often simply give up and go back to the text editor.
So really it added time (and frustration) to my workflow. I stopped using it and haven't gone back to anything like it since. That was in about 1998. I still use a text editor. In fact, I'm writing in one now!
This was all brought to mind because I'm using Blogger. It has a post editor that tries to be helpful. In my opinion, it isn't. It's worse than Dreamweaver and if I try to edit the raw HTML to fix its horrifyingly bad attempts to make sure nothing looks the way I would ever want it to, I instantly get lost in a maze of mush. I would estimate that 90% of what it uses is irrelevant garbage.
Here's how they describe it:
If you use Edit HTML, especially to add tables and other advanced HTML to your posts, you should find that the new editor has a number of enhancements to make the experience less frustrating, or, dare we say it, even pleasant.
Right.
As for the WYSIWYG editor, I find it very frustrating; almost impossible to use if I want to include images*. I recently found the way to add an image where I want it to go and I have to say it's completely insane. Just totally nuts. It doesn't make sense in any way whatsoever and instead of finding the trick useful it just makes me mad. Here's how it works. If the cursor is at the top of the document and you add an image, it adds the image at the top of the document. If you move the cursor somewhere else, it... still adds the damn image at the top of the document. UNLESS you create an empty space and change the paragraph mode to centered. Then it adds the image there. Why? I have no idea.
To make things even less useful and sane, images can be dragged in the document. By which I mean you can drag it from the top centered to the top left. And back again. If there is a way to drag it from the top to some other area in the document, I haven't found it. By why even bother to put up with it? Quite honestly, it would be much faster for me to write my own HTML, overwrite the styles for this blog instance and just do it all myself. Faster and easier and better.
Just like Dreamweaver. Long live plain text!
* For the record, I will probably use the tools supplied to add images, but I will use the plain HTML editor to move them around.
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