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NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 29, 2008 09:43 PM
from the all-the-finest-sites dept.
from the all-the-finest-sites dept.
eldavojohn writes "The design director of NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, recently answered readers' questions in the Times's occasional feature 'Ask the Times.' He was asked how the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it. His answer begins: 'It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.'"
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Hand-coding? (Score:2)
Re:Hand-coding? (Score:5, Funny)
Hand-coding agent: I hate this guy, he's refreshing his browser every minute on the same news. I can't keep up.
Hand-coding supervisor: PrintScreen it!
Hand-conding agent: Brilliant!
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Re:Hand-coding? (Score:5, Funny)
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Works for me too (Score:2, Interesting)
I find that hand-coding works for HTML/CSS, provided of course you include it in a scripting language like PHP.
It's less work than it sounds and the results DO look better - you get a more original look and things can be made to look exactly how you want, instead of being restrained by the wysiwyg software's design limitations.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Great idea! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's nothing. (Score:5, Funny)
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Another opportunity to post... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Another opportunity to post... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.subir.com/lynx/enhanced_images.html [subir.com]
W3C (Score:5, Informative)
Valid Markup != Good Code (Score:5, Interesting)
In the real world us web developers have to deal with interoperability on many different levels. We have to make sure the layout looks the same on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari with Windows XP & Vista, OSX, and Linux using the same code base. Most of this however has a lot to do with how talented your CSS developer is. And unfortunately for you kiddies, any less isn't perfect.
So to spell it out for those that don't know, here's the real difference between WYSIWYG and pure text:
In a WYSIWYG editor you tend to do everything the same way every time you do it. That means that all your links, images, and code snippets come from the same code base and therefore have all the same pitfalls and good points. Unfortunatly the wonderful world of DOM doesn't work that way. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and objects like Flash, Quicktime, and Java have very specific ways that they interact with each other and the browser and so what you generally find is that the reason you code by hand is not for the specific reason of coding by hand but simply put you really can not build good, quality websites with WYSIWYG editors. At some point you will most assuredly find yourself digging in the HTML.
Finally, on the topic of validating your markup. The Markup validaters that are out there are only good as tools of the trade and shouldn't be used as the end-all be-all certification of quality markup. They are tools that should be used by a web developer to run through and make sure they can be as close to valid as possible but I am willing to bet that out of the top 100 sites on the internet, the front page of all of them will produce Markup validation errors. The reason is simple: The validation rules are so restrictive that there is no point even worrying about them. It would be impossible to make a working website by being totally loyal to the markup rules.
Especially with the validator's stupidity in treating & signs in the href attribute of my a elements as the beginning of an entity which it's not!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right about valid code being rare, but wrong about the reason. Sturgeon's Revelation applies to developers.
That's not even close to being true. Take th
Re:Valid Markup != Good Code (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it is. Don't just take my word for it, take a look at what the HTML specification has to say on the matter [w3.org].
You are confusing a URI with the representation of that URI within an HTML document. Just because it appears as & in the document, it doesn't mean that's what you end up with after it has been parsed.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is quite wrong. You absolutely can make a site that validates, and (what's more important, in fact) is actually semantically correct HTML, yet displays properly in all the major browsers out there. A good example is the Opera [opera.com] website (validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict [w3.org]). Also, if you have a browser that has such feature, try disabling CSS and JavaScript entirely, and see how it looks then - I was pretty surprised to
Re:W3C (Score:5, Interesting)
53 walmart.com
36 exxon.com
26 chevron.com
33 gm.com
76 conocophillips.com
0 ge.com
29 ford.com
52 citigroup.com
105 bankofamerica.com
26 att.com
28 www.berkshirehathaway.com
8 jpmorganchase.com
148 aig.com
55 hp.com
0 ibm.com
144 valero.com
2 verizon.com
180 mckesson.com
5 cardinalhealth.com
1082 www.goldmansachs.com
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:W3C (Score:5, Informative)
I knew somebody would pop up with this misconception. Did you know that the web has already been through this — not once but twice — and proven you wrong?
Netscape 2 was quite aggressive when it came to guessing when ampersands were mistakenly unencoded. Cue lots of people not bothering to do things correctly, and saying things exactly like you are — "What's the point? It makes no difference!"
Then Netscape 3 came out. It wasn't as aggressive as Netscape 2. All those people who cut corners had to rush to fix all of their pages. All the people who did it correctly the first time around didn't have to do any extra work.
Now Netscape 3 still guessed a little bit — if you left off the semicolon, it would pick up on it and guess correctly. So lots of the dumb people from the previous example didn't learn their lesson, and skipped the semicolon.
Can you guess what happened? Yep, that's right, Netscape 4 came out and broke all their pages again. And all the people who did things correctly laughed at them.
Sure, if you don't bother to do things right, today's major browsers will probably guess that you're an idiot and work around your bugs. But there's certainly no guarantee that tomorrow's browsers will do so. When you can do things correctly right now for no effort, why on earth would you risk incurring extra work in the future? Is it really so difficult to type & instead of &?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They will try to work around your bugs. There's no guarantee that the heuristics of a given browser will succeed in correctly guessing what you actually meant in a given case.
The best argument for writing bugless web pages is not that it takes less work (it does), nor that they works with more browsers (they do) and thus give you more customers. No, the best argument
Re:W3C (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not telling them that some browsers will think it's wrong, it's telling them it is wrong. Validators don't check to make sure browsers can understand your document, they check if you have made any syntax errors. Writing <br/> in an HTML document is wrong, regardless of any particular browser's handling of it.
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Re:W3C (Score:5, Informative)
No, one is correct for XHTML and incorrect for HTML, and one is incorrect for XHTML and correct for HTML. The NYTimes use HTML. That means the XHTML syntax is incorrect.
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Re:W3C (Score:4, Informative)
This is simply not true. It's incorrect and invalid.
What you may be thinking of is Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification. It lays out a series of guidelines that minimise incompatibility with legacy user-agents. This means that it is relatively safe to transmit XHTML 1.0 documents following these guidelines as text/html. What it does not mean is that those XHTML 1.0 documents magically become valid HTML documents. They are not.
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Re:W3C (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:W3C (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. <br /> should be, AFAIK, guaranteed to work in any working HTML parser because all HTML browsers have to ignore unknown properties in tags, including potentially that slash, in order to be forward-compatible with future changes to the specification. Assuming they included the space, then IMHO the W3C validator is being way too pedantic (as usual). If they left out the space (<br/>), then the W3C validator is right to warn about it, as that form does choke some HTML parsers, IIRC.
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Re:W3C (Score:4, Insightful)
That reasoning would work if the people behind XML had chosen any other character to indicate empty elements. But unfortunately, they chose the slash. Not many people realise because browser support is rare, but a slash inside an opening tag means that it is the end of the tag and the contents follow. Basically, <foo/>x/ is equivalent to <foo>>x</foo> .
So no, while parsers that don't implement HTML fully might mistakenly treat it like an attribute, a parser that fully implements HTML cannot do so, and a validator certainly shouldn't.
What on earth do you think a validator is for, if not to point out syntax errors? Do you complain that your spelling checker is being pedantic when it tells you that you have misspelt something?
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Re:W3C (Score:5, Informative)
It may or may not be improper American English, but "misspelt" is certainly correct English. Consult the OED [askoxford.com] if you don't believe me.
This is far from the first time I've had an ignorant American attempt to "correct" my proper English into your regional dialect. It's pretty annoying and reinforces negative aspects of your national stereotype.
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Blame our woefully inadequate education system (Score:3, Insightful)
I must say however, that your insistence on lumping everyone in this country into the "ignorant American" stereotype is also pret
Re:W3C (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Browsers that don't comply are pretty much worthless. You can't even view the W3C specification without ignoring unknown attributes. Good luck with almost any web page on the planet. The following sites all either have nonstandard attributes or are missing required attributes:
You get the picture. Good luck using the web with a browser that performs strict attribute validation.... It may technically be non-binding, but in reality, any br
Benefits vs Issues (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Handcoding takes a lot more effort and needs more 'actual' writers than before. So more techies keep their jobs in a recession.
Score: Hancoding 1: Dreamweaver: 0
2. Hancoding requires extensive knowledge of all CSS and DHTML codes plus javascript/JScript. So only the really good techies get the job, and not some script monkey. Survival of fittest.
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 0
3. Handcoding takes far more time than is necessary in a changing scenario of today's news. Ef
Re:Benefits vs Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Handcoding takes a lot more effort and needs more 'actual' writers than before. So more techies keep their jobs in a recession.
Score: Hancoding 1: Dreamweaver: 0
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 0
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 1
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 2
I hate them for wasting my money as a shareholder.
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Dreamweaver/Homesite (Score:2)
While I do like the split development window(code/WYSIWYG), being a coder I spend most of my time in the code window and always have to check against multiple browsers.
I think having the WYSIWYG view is a benefit, although I hate having to hit F5 to refresh the WYSIWYG continuously.
[GIANT FOOT ICON GOES HERE] (Score:2)
How much work does that involve? (Score:3, Informative)
Dreamweaver is an excellent tool (Score:5, Interesting)
1. DW lets you code at the source code level if you choose.
2. DW is much faster--in Design View--at creating tables.
3. DW allows for flipping back and forth or split view.
4. DW does not rewrite your code (for the most part).
I use DW every day. I am not even conscious of flipping between the 2 views. Some things are done better in Design View and some in Code View.
CSS support is very good in DW.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Stupid comment by Vinh about Dreamweaver.
1. DW lets you code at the source code level if you choose.
2. DW is much faster--in Design View--at creating tables.
3. DW allows for flipping back and forth or split view.
4. DW does not rewrite your code (for the most part).
I use DW every day. I am not even conscious of flipping between the 2 views. Some things are done better in Design View and some in Code View.
CSS support is very good in DW.
1. Why use a heavy tool like DreamWeaver if you're mostly just editing the source directly?
2. Nobody uses tables anymore, at least not as much as they incorrectly used to before for formatting since CSS gives you a lot more control. This practice thankfully died out.
3. Alt-Tab is just as fast if you have your browser open, or multiple browsers. I usually check IE and FF when I'm working on layout.
4. For some people, even a little bit of code changes is too much.
If I'm working on a php or jsp page that r
Re:Dreamweaver is a mediocre tool (Score:3, Informative)
CSS support is very good in DW.
Actually, no, it's not. At least through Dreamweaver 8, CSS is sort of a bolted-on afterthought. The Dreamweaver "Properties" pane and the CSS system do not play well together. Dreamweaver has a useful GUI for table-based layout, but falls down on DIV-based layout. (This isn't entirely Dreamweaver's fault. DIV-based "float" and "clear" just weren't a well chosen set of primitives. It's trying to solve a 2D problem with a 1D mechanism.)
Dreamweaver 3 was easier to use.
I feel OLD. (Score:4, Funny)
Well it looks great (Score:3, Interesting)
The re-design they did a couple years ago is a pleasure to navigate, to read (I love the fonts) and while the photos are always top notch, I must say the award goes to whoever makes the graphs. They have the most fantastic and unique ways of presenting data - far beyond a boring Excel bar graph. I am really really impressed by the interesting and informative graphs which are often highly interactive, and I would love to know who thinks them up.
At the end of the day, they use templates (I believe he says as much in TFA, IIRC, I read it a week or so ago) and hand tweak the site to make it sure it stays cross-platform pretty. Each story has a similar layout so it can't be hard for them to simply tweak by hand where needed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Summary: "A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies. Here are three of history's best."
Doesn't everyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Link Management (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as it may work in principle to build highly optimized pages by hand markup, it must be a nightmare to make any changes to something as tightly constructed as a hardwired web site.
And that's not all... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes and, err, no? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dude. Let me help you.
This will be KDE-specific, but I'm sure you could use Gnome programs for the same thing. For that matter, you could also setup SSHFS, or NFS.
Open Kate.
Click File, Open.
In the file selector, type: fish://user@someserver/some/path/and/file.html
Edit.
Save.
Marvel as your file is magically updated, without any bizarre management tools. With the benefit of being secure.
For extra
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:text editors (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Yes, and? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the case for almost any *large* dynamic website, but having spent a couple of years doing web development in the design industry, I can tell you that at least in the UK, a large proportion of the small agencies are using Dreamweaver for most things.
Fuck knows why - I'd rather be handed an Illustrator file and turn it into HTML then have the crap that Dreamweaver spits out given to me, and have to try and turn it into something dynamic.
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