Is it easier to start a links site...

[odysseus]

Originally Posted by MrYum

Personally, I won't touch an editor...all hand coding for me. But, if you're going to use an editor...use it for convenience only and make damn sure you know what the code should look like before trusting an editor to do it for you.

I'm of the exact same school as MrYum here. That said, the newest version of Dreamweaver has on hell of a good code view to work in. I never used it's design view, but the code view is my wet dream. But this is from someone who coded in notepad for a long time before even knowing that there were programs made for web design, and learned HTML on WebTV, so I'm stuck that way regardless.

[Halfdeck]

Baby steps. Coding everything by hand is a huge time sink, but it's how you should start if you don't know HTML. Once you learn to hand code a few free sites, get Dreamweaver or Homesite to speed up your work. Even if you stay in code view, it's a much faster alternative to notepad or TextPad.

[Toby]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

...Coding everything by hand is a huge time sink...

Exactly. I'm about as "old school" as it gets when it comes to coding. My Comp Sci degree is dated 1983. My senior sequence was in Assemblers and Compilers, so we're talkin' machine code.

Coding web pages by hand, particularly if you're using CSS elements, is just too time consuming. I build the basic structure in design view, then fine tune and add any scripting (ASP, PHP, javascript, etc) in code view.

Dreamweaver is a powerful tool that can create very clean code if used properly. But it call also create an absolute mess. My best advice is to never highlight in design view to select an object, click within the desired area then click the appropriate tag in the status bar.

This has gotten a little further off topic than intended, but my point is this: It's not the tool that's bad, but the improper use of the tool.