I started building websites using notepad and a browser. I eventually moved on to programs which provided syntax highlighting and code completion, but I never stopped writing code. Yes WYSIWYG editors may be helpful, but personally I need to know what I’m publishing. So if you have already judged me as a dinosaur trying to hold on to days past soon to be extinct feel free to write this article off as a rant, but if you want to become a better web developer get back to the basics.
Html, css, and JavaScript. These are the building blocks of any website; they have been for a long time. So long that WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver, GoLive, Fireworks, Visual Studio, etc. have evolved to allow people to build web pages without even being aware of the languages in use. The days of having to view the source of a page to learn a technique are fading, now one only needs to find the right button in their program of choice. Novices want to make a website quickly and feel they are wasting time typing out html. Professionals want to build larger more impressive sites and feel that understanding the html, css, and JavaScript their framework spits out is slowing them down. Of course what happens when there is no button, or when the framework doesn’t have the right control, well that’s when you need a dinosaur.
So now we need to build upon the tools being used, which will be impossible if we never took the time to understand how they work. My advice is to look at the code generated, study the building blocks used. Understand that saving a design to a web page generates html and often image slices. Look at the JavaScript behind an update panel’s Ajax call. Decide when and if the viewstate should be passed along with the xmlHttpRequest. Although it may feel like a waste of time given that these items work, I guarantee that it will create a better programmer.
The more a programmer views the final product the more likely he is to strive for clean semantic html, unobtrusive JavaScript, and styles separated out into an external css file. Doing so may even save the website from a lawsuit. Most importantly, the next time an innovative site needs to be created, one which can’t be created with a push of a button, it will be a simple matter of writing some code.
I may be a dinosaur, my kind slowly going extinct, but I like to think I’m just forcing myself to be a better programmer and I know there are many other programmers who feel the same.