Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

I wasn't asked, but since it's a subject near & dear to my heart, I'll jump in too.

I agree with what Moe said: all commercial web development software ∗is∗ crap. His description pretty much describes my setup.

Historically, I've used MS FrontPage, and then gone into "code" view and 'fixed,' cleaned, and extended everything. Or I go into Notepad, because Notepad just says, "Yes, boss" and does what I tell it to without adding anything or moving anything when I close the file.

You might be amazed at how often I use Notepad, and I do this for a living. I even code ASP.NET in notepad... at the end of the day, if you know what you're doing, there's nothing you can't do by directly manipulating the code. (If you don't know what you're doing, then, well, I guess it's a different story.)

But I'm an old curmudgeon; I absolutely abhor any software that tries to second-guess me, or wipe my... well, let's say I detest software that tries to help me across the street like an old lady. I have more people trying to shove expensive 'does it all for you' software at me, and stuff that requires plug-ins just turns me right off.

Also, I'm frequently called in to repair web sites that were created by other people who do not know what they're doing, but consider themselves web designers because they bought an expensive "automated" program. What a nightmare. The bloated code is unbelievable, and things like variables are given cryptic names because they were created by a machine and not a human. I usually start completely from scratch when I have to repair a site created this way. I won't name the packages that are the biggest offenders, because I don't want to offend someone here who may love them, but let me assure you that you can code anything by hand with no bloat in ways these applications can't even 'dream' of.

At work, however, my [younger] assistant rides me about doing things "the hard way" so we're switching to VisualStudio.NET/SourceSafe; but I'm only doing it because we now need versioning-control software, not because I think that I can't continue to use a text editor forever.

So that's the cranky old man answer. ;)

(What did you expect? I'm spending years soldering together a gargantuan synthesizer that uses patchcords and technically only makes one note at a time! If I were a 'take the easy way out' kind of person, I wouldn't be here!)

Mr. T

-----Original Message-----
From: mate_stubb [mailto:mate_stubb@...]

> OT, Larry, Moe and Paul... which software do you "prefer" for

> creating your web site...

This answer probably won't help you much...

IMO, all commercial web development software is crap. It either

produces horribly bloated nasty code, or produces pages that run only

on one type of browser.

At work I use XML to define the contents of a page, XSLT stylesheets

to control the presentation, and a server side xslt processor to

combine the two which produces the clientside javascript and HTML

that actually gets downloaded to the browser. These run on Apache web

servers and Tomcat java servers.

I laid out the hotrodmotm.com website using Microsloth Front Page,

then had to go in and fix everything up by hand so that the pages

would display on Netscape and other browsers.

Moe