[wellylug] CSS/HTML Gurus?

[Cliff Pratt]

David Murray wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, Timothy Goddard wrote:
> 
>> Any site can be maintained with a text editor. If you manage a small
>> page, you spend most of your time writing HTML. If you manage a large
>> page, you spend it writing in scripting languages such as PERL, PHP,
>> Python, or Ruby or in templating markup such as XSLT. WYSIWYG editors
>> will only leave you with a heap of trash that will be incredibly
>> difficult to make significant additions to in the future.
> 
> Would you care to give examples of "heap[s] of trash that [are] 
> incredibly difficult to [add to] in the future"?
> 
Lazy writers can produce horrendous masses of spaghetti code, using 
*any* method, even the 'notepad' or 'vim' method. Good writers can also 
produce horrible code if they are under a deadline and the requirements 
keep changing. Also in anything more complicated than a single page 
site, everyone seems to have a different style. Understanding the 
previous person's style does help a lot in debugging and modification. 
After two or three people have handled the code almost any style would 
be lost, and the code much more difficult to add to.

I blame entropy.

Cheers,

Cliff