How is it that this wonderful technological miracle aka 'The Internet' is still driven largely off of software that's no more helpful than a 1980's wordprocessor?
I'm sure there's better stuff out there, obviously the people at Amazon and Google don't sit there merrily pulling their hair out over layout - so how come this hasn't distilled down to something 'simple' - yet?
The way I see it, you're not really editing a webpage, what you're really doing is desktop publishing but without that icky end bit where you have to print something. So my question is 'Where is Quark Express' for the Internet age?
I'm ranting again because I've just spent a happy hour and a half watching 'Mr Beans Holiday' while I updated a few pages on my site. Nothing grand, but naturally DreamWeaver wants to do nothing other than get in my way and make this process as God-awful as possible. I shouldn't whine, I'm sure that there are far, far worse products out there, but I'm pretty sure that they all boil down to the same old problem that you really have to know what you're doing when it comes to building a site.
Clearly, for the most part - I have no idea. It's no secret that sections of my site do truly suck. They don't render properly on whichever new browser was featured on the front of 'Wired' this month, the text goes all crappy if you increase the font size and in places the pictures obliterate the text if you resize the window. All of this Adobe managed to fix with Acrobat - so why can't we somehow just translate that into something easy to use?
Obviously someone has cracked this problem. Professionally built sites don't suffer from these issues, so somewhere along the line that knowledge does exist. Since this is the case, how is it that that technology hasn't become as enabling (read 'easy to use') to morons like myself.
With all the technological resources that the IT world has to offer, why is it so hard to build a solid website?
Maybe 20 years from now we'll all be using sites to build sites, and that the convergence of publishing to the web, paper or TV is so blurred that it makes no difference anymore. One can only hope. Until that happens I guess I'm stuck hurling abuse at my laptop at quarter past ten on a Saturday evening.
2 comments:
Probably because the web developers at big companies edit the HTML and CSS by hand - or at least take a Dreamweaver (or whatever) template and hack it by hand.
If you're using Firefox, get the Firebug and Web Developer add-ons. It doesn't quite make it point and click but you can use them to take an existing page and experiment with CSS/HTML to get the hang of it.
Or, you can just sit back and gaze in awe and wonder at my own personal site.
I couldn't agree more... website editing/dev is a royal pain. I end up creating a basic template in Nvu (full of nasty horrid bugs) and then hack it all by hand..
Another annoying thing, web development isn't just about about getting content in the right place, it's getting the right content in the right place looking the right way!!! Being just a techie doesn't cut it in web dev land, you need some graphic design skills aswell, sadly most techies don't have the faintest idea past a screen made up of 80x30 characters.
Tables or divs? Tables and divs? speak to css bores and they talk of the beauty of css.. sadly in reality, you want a web page to look good with 'most' browsers and you need a mixture of both, or you'll end up applying hacks in your css that might not hold it when the standards change!
Man!! what have you started! I think I need to breath.... I do have sympathy, I've spent the past few days trying to get one of my websites to work on Firefox, Opera and InTURDnet explorer, fix it in one and you'll break it in another. If I had any hair, I'd have pulled it out by now.
In response to steve, cheers for the links to Firebug and Web Developer, will have a look.. btw.. I spent a bit of time gazing in awe at your own personal website? give me a hint? was it a picture of Canada in a blizzard?
Paul
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