When to use WYSIWYG Editors?

Question

It appears to me, from searching stackoverflow, that hand coding html/css is superior to using WYSIWYG editors. I'm a few weeks into learning html and css, and I've only hand-coded so far (though I do have the Adobe Suite).

My questions: is it ever worth learning how to use a WYSIWYG editor (like dreamweaver)? And, more importantly, when would it be better to use it over handcoding?

Answer 1

In short, unless you're just messing about, I don't think it is ever worth learning a WYSIWYG program instead of learning how to hand-code, but by all means use one to help you learn how to do the other.

The point of a WYSIWYG editor is to hide as much of the code away as possible. Sometimes this is a good thing (repetitive, boring tasks), but sometimes not (learning, debugging, code elegance and efficiency).

If you want to knock together a simple website, probably won't make websites that often, and don't need or want to know about the underlying code, then WYSIWYG is perfect. It's also good if you are new to web development in general, and are still getting to grips with the general concepts of programming, nevermind trying to understand HTML and CSS themselves.

However, if your intentions aren't so casual, and (new to web development or not) you are prepared to spend some time looking through documents and learning from tutorials, then avoid WYSIWYG as much as possible. Hand-coding has a steeper learning curve and requires more patience, but it's worth it; your final code will be more efficient and cleaner, and because you'll know it inside and out, you can debug it more easily too.

All that said, having a good IDE to code in can make all the difference, even if all it does is syntax highlighting and auto completion. Dreamweaver isn't great, but I'd take it over Wordpad any day! Notepad++ is a great, minimalist program to write websites with, and a very good starting point. Personally I use Netbeans, but you may find it a bit OTT for HTML and CSS.