NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS

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.'"

Great idea!

Maybe we can use this idea to write programs, too.

Re:That's nothing.

That's not coding by hand, that's compiling by hand ;-p.

Another opportunity to post...

The badge [dimspace.com] I used to put on all my sites...

Re:Another opportunity to post...

Nice. I once thought about making an image that said, "This site best viewed in Lynx."

W3C

...and yet they get 455(!) errors. That's not very good. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnytimes.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 [w3.org].

Valid Markup != Good Code

While the purists are going to argue that valid markup defines the quality of the code on a given website the reality of the real world always tends to rear it's ugly head and debunk that fantasy.

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! /rant >.>

Re:Valid Markup != Good Code

An & sign in a link to a URL isn't a syntax error

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].

treating it as such would nullify all GET parameters after the first one.

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.

Re:W3C

Just what I was wondering: "Maybe, because they hand-code everything, they will pass the validation that all the fancy tools fail at so badly." Anyway, they are not alone. Here are the error couns for the Fortume top 20 companies (top of the Fortune 1000 list) manage on the w3c validator:

    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

Re:W3C

Also, they use <br/> in HTML 4 and it is telling them that they shouldn't do that because some web browsers will think it's wrong.

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.

Re:W3C

<br /> is XHTML standard and <br> is the regular HTML 4 standard. Both are correct

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.

Re:W3C

while XHTML syntax is not strictly speaking correct HTML it is still valid HTML.

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.

Re:W3C

Be that as it may, Bogtha is correct. We aren't talking about what works here, we are talking about what the standard says. The standard for XHTML says to use a slash, the standard for HTML 4 says not to. That is the discussion, and really, the end of it.

Re:W3C

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.

Re:W3C

all HTML browsers have to ignore unknown properties in tags

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.

the W3C validator is being way too pedantic (as usual).

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?

Re:W3C

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.

Re:W3C

The two are not mutually exclusive. It's perfectly possible to make even the most beautiful sites render accurately across all the major browsers and still contain perfectly valid markup. It smacks of being lazy, or just not knowing the importance of validating code.

Re:W3C

fix whiney warnings that have no real world effect?

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 &amp; instead of &?

Dreamweaver is an excellent tool

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.

I feel OLD.

wysiwyg (what you see is what you get)

I remember when this acronym was so frequently used as a selling point in the 80s that you wouldn't have had to explain it.

Doesn't everyone?

He doesn't mean that they hand-code every page -- he says very clearly that they use a CMS with templates. All he said is that they don't use a GUI tool to create the templates. This is true of just about any significant site. What is the imagined news here?

And that's not all...

I hear they have people who hand-write the news stories: sentence by sentence, word by word. Can you imagine?

Re:Benefits vs Issues

Let's look 'objectively' at this:
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

No, given a good IDE with some basics it takes less effort. Every time I want to use Dreamweaver I end up losing some hair. It's a frustrating piece of software if you know what you're doing or want to do and it won't let you.

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

This is a good thing. Your designers SHOULD know the ins and outs of 80-90% of their code and tags.

3. Handcoding takes far more time than is necessary in a changing scenario of today's news. Effort not proportional to returns. As a shareholder, i would sue them for wasting money.
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 1

I doubt they hand code every story into the page. They have a template / publishing system for all articles / layouts. It's probably far, far faster to do it by hand then trying to wrap Dreamweaver into it.

4. Dreamweaver allows preview easily and pretty much automates repeatable tasks. Handcoding requires a Mechanical Turk.
Score: Hancoding 2: Dreamweaver: 2

dual monitors, sshfs mounted file system and vim will do it far faster then Dreamweaver.. alt-tab works okay if you're stuck with one monitor.

So its a tie.

Nope, I would say hand-coding: 3.5 and Dreamweaver .5

I appreciate NYTimes sticking to manual tasks for an electronic page as an end user and a techie.
I hate them for wasting my money as a shareholder.

I would applaud them for not wasting your money on software licenses and doing the job correctly.

Re:Hand-coding?

Overhead at an outsourcing facility:

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!

Re:Hand-coding?

Please refrain from alluding to such explicit language. For goodness sakes, Slashdot is not the Netherlands after 9 PM.

Re:text editors

No Way! If they coded it with emacs, the average reader wouldn't know what 12 keys to hit simultaneously to get to the story.