+ - Website design tools for 14 year old 3
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An anonymous reader writes "I am pretty computer literate, and have a son who is extremely computer savvy. He taught himself C#, Javascript, built his own desktop with his Christmas and birthday money two years ago and is an avid reader of stackoverflow, reddit and many forums.
He recently was asked to design a website for an architect, and likes to code by hand using Notepad++ and the Chrome developer tools. He uses CSS and Javascript libraries, but is convinced that all visual editors (Dreamweaver, Expression Web and so on) are only for extreme beginners and create non responsive, non compliant sites. I argue with him that while handcoding abilities are essential and great there is a value in knowing and using WYSIWYG editors. We agreed that having slashdot weigh in would be useful — comments appreciated on either the approach or good tools he can and should use."
He recently was asked to design a website for an architect, and likes to code by hand using Notepad++ and the Chrome developer tools. He uses CSS and Javascript libraries, but is convinced that all visual editors (Dreamweaver, Expression Web and so on) are only for extreme beginners and create non responsive, non compliant sites. I argue with him that while handcoding abilities are essential and great there is a value in knowing and using WYSIWYG editors. We agreed that having slashdot weigh in would be useful — comments appreciated on either the approach or good tools he can and should use."
+1 Hand Coding (Score:1)
Been coding for 33 years and my text editor is a universal IDE. I really do not like language specific IDEs nor for web site design. Guess I'm just old school that way, but drag & drop development seem to gloss over the understanding of code. I recall a cyber punk story where people hunt and collect fragments of code to copy and paste together to fix computer systems, because the art of writing code has been lost.
Maybe he's right? (Score:1)
but is convinced that all visual editors (Dreamweaver, Expression Web and so on) are only for extreme beginners and create non responsive, non compliant sites
The force is strong in this one.
He's right. (Score:2)
As someone who's gotten $30/hr to do web development, I can say that I've never used anything more complex than Kate (basically KDE's Notepad++.) Don't use IDEs, and avoid frameworks when possible. Your IDE is going to double the time it takes your page to load, and hammer your server. Your framework is going to do the same thing, and be impossible to debug. I've seen frameworks (HTML5 boilerplate...) cause a single HTML page that just has a 'hello world' header, nothing more, take _MINUTES_ to load. From t