Stop using Dreamweaver, Frontpage and (tables)!
I’m seeing more and more people using Dreamweaver and Frontpage for webdesign lately. Please don’t use them to make ‘professional’ sites. They produce really bad code. You can put it to the test: make a simple site in Frontpage or Dreamweaver and validate it for HTML or XHTML. You’ll probably find a lot of errors, especially when it’s a big site. If you want to make professional websites, learn to code manually. It’s not that hard to learn HTML and CSS.
These kind of people use a lot of tables in their design too. Tables are the worst thing you could ever use to lay out your design. They take much longer to load than a div, and make your filesize unnecissarily large. Browsing through your code will make your eyes hurt and finding a specific element in your code will take much more time.Tables were designed to show you tabular data, not a whole layout.
deathshadows’ comment on the use of tables:
I would argue your bit on tables - They are usually only larger if you put the presentation in your markup as you can style a table with CSS, They are often LESS code which means they often take less time to LOAD, though I think you are thinking ‘render’ - which is not true either if you put add ‘table-layout:fixed’ to your CSS. As to browsing through the code if the designer used proper indentation and coding practices this should be no less painful than going through div’s.
So when you use your tables properly and not for your whole layout there shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ve actually used dreamweaver for a time and the reason was that it nicely coloured my code
Then I can understand it. But why use Dreamweaver if there are a lot of free aplications who highlight your code?
Just because I didn’t knew any and dreamweaver was the first one I came across.
I’m with you 300% about Dreamweaver - It’s the most common subject to come up in my posts on sites like Digital Point or IWDN because the code vomited up by most WYSIWYGS can only in the loosest terms even be considered HTML - and certainly falls short on things like separation of presentation from content, minimalist markup and a whole host of other rubbish they saddle you with.
One look at their templates or worse, that stupid malfing mm_ javascript rubbish shows that the only thing you can learn from using dreamweaver is how NOT to code a website. Throw in the acid trip of syntax highlighting, the lazy buggy ‘code completion’ which often produces the wrong code or in the wrong place, and dozens of other ‘behaviors’ that prevent people from learning good coding habits in the first place, and it’s a total and miserable /FAIL/.
As I keep saying, if Dreamweaver is a professional grade tool I’m in line to be the next Mahatma.
That said, I would argue your bit on tables - They are usually only larger if you put the presentation in your markup as you can style a table with CSS, They are often LESS code which means they often take less time to LOAD, though I think you are thinking ‘render’ - which is not true either if you put add ‘table-layout:fixed’ to your CSS. As to browsing through the code if the designer used proper indentation and coding practices this should be no less painful than going through div’s.
There ARE issues with using tables as semantically it is incorrect, but even that is argueable since one of the definitions of a table is ‘an orderly division of content into rows and/or columns’ - Rows and/or columns? That sounds like a webpage to me.
Most of the arguements used against tables for layout are more myth than fact, or stem from people using tables when completely inappropriate (wrapping a single TD), not using proper headers (TH exists for a reason), or making fat bloated nested tables… When these bad coders stop using tables all they do is make fat bloated nested DIV’s with classes and ID’s thrown at everything - so where’s the difference?
What really galls me is when I see people calling tables for layout a hack, and then they throw endless CSS hacks and conditional comments at doing things like 100% min-height layouts.just so they can avoid using a table.
100% min-height, fluid width, content first layout using tables that you can style all three columns directly? Tables win.
http://battletech.hopto.org/html_tutorials/3coltable.html
You do that as DIV it’s going to be more HTML, more CSS, and as such it will load SLOWER.
NOT that I use tables for layout all that much anymore, but it just really burns me to see so many myths propagated about their use. There are times not to use them - wrapping single elements, when you need to add presentational markup to make them work, etc, etc…But to dismiss a tool outright on little more than made up myths?
I guess you’re right about the tables. I actually avoided them because of those myths, thanks to let me know!
You guys actually care what the code looks like or that dreamweavers code is messy? In the real world where you get paid to produce sites quickly and on time, a wysiwyg is absolutely essential to get anything done. And the whole argument about css versus table layout - you think the client gives a shit? Really? Explain to them about load time of div tags versus table tags and watch their eyes glaze over like a day-old donut.