Re: hand-coding vrs WYSWYG

I need both hand coding and WSIWYG for speed and the best product...

As a designer, I find the way that Dreamweaver and Fireworks work 
hand-in-hand to be a big timesaver.  It helps me visualize.  But to 
get the finer tuning I want in handling text blocks or white space, I 
need to hand code.  An extra <BR> or something can be hard to control 
in WSIWYG.  Side-by-side coding and visual windows in Dreamweaver 
work great.

Web production assistants here want to work only WSIWYG because 
they're used to page layout programs and they don't want to leave 
that comfortable visual environment.  This means extra breaks, empty 
tags and the extra file size doesn't get fixed, because there's no 
interest in even looking at the code.  So to keep things looking 
good, I have to create templates in Dreamweaver, using stylesheets, 
that will iron out any sloppiness by my assistants.  Fortunately, 
Dreamweaver is a good tool for this.  If I couldn't control style 
consistency this way, I'd go nuts.

I have a difficult time convincing web production folks that they 
must learn to look at code they're generating as a good habit and to 
progress into design.  Anyone else have this problem?  Magic 
solutions?

-Ellen Guttadauro

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