I just had two pretty full on experiences, one good and one bad, which I feel are very relevant to this thread...
Situation #1
Upon learning that Google AdSense do actually manually approve their affiliate applications, I was faced with a dilemma. I've never liked the idea of having to build your whole site, apply for an affiliate program, and THEN go back through and edit all your affiliate links in, I think that's ridiculous. So I needed a site that would be approved, without going to the trouble of designing an actual site, with actual content.
The site you'll see now at
http://www.fifthdimensioncomputing.com/ was the result. Using NoteTab, I banged together that site, complete with a forum, an online store, news links, and more, in less than two hours. That's hand coding, from scratch. A few hours later, I was approved for Google AdSense, and now I can start working on my real site.
Granted, the site you see there is relatively pointless and has no real value, but still, it's a multi-page, tidy layout, fully functional niche site, and it took just over an hour to bang together in a plain text editor. So what do I need a WYSIWYG editor for at all??
Situation #2
So I've got my AdSense account, and I start working on a real site now. I spend a few hours working on a basic template page - a frameset, and one fairly simple HTML page, except for having to integrate several affiliate codes, line up tables, etc. I finish it off, check it in my browser, it looks perfect. So I cut the guts of the page, leaving the header and footer, ready to make the next page, but instead of hitting Save As, I accidentally hit Save - and overwrite my completed page that'd I'd spent several hours working on, with a blank page. And as it turns out, NoteTab clears the Undo history when you save the document, so there's no going back.
So, dread starts setting in as I'm trying to find some way of retrieving this file. It's still there in my browser, I'm looking right at it, but I can't get to the code I'd spent hours handwriting. I hit View Source in my browser, and it shows me the source of the modified/erased page instead. I hit Save Page As from the browser, same result. Because I was viewing from the local copy on my hard drive, it just keeps pulling that file, even though I can see the original right there (at least until I were to hit Refresh or close the browser!).
In the end, I was saved in the most unlikely way. On a hunch, I selected everything I could see in the browser window, and dragged and dropped it into Netscape Composer. It retained all the formatting perfectly, and much to my joy, didn't garble my code too badly. True, I had to re-enter the various affiliate codes and Javascript (WYSIWYG editors *always* garble external code like that!), but when cleaning the code up took half an hour instead of the several hours it would have taken to redo the page from scratch, or clean up the train wreck that many other WYSIWYG editors would have left from something as simple as that, I sure was glad to have Netscape Composer on hand! Really, the only formatting changes I needed to make were tidiness to conform to my own coding standards for when I have to refer back to the code later - there were almost no added junk tags or mess, and besides, as I said, it messing with my affiliate codes like all WYSIWYG editors do, I could easily have left it if I weren't so picky about code formatting.
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So there you have it. In the space of two days, I've proved yet again that a text editor really is all I need to design a completely functional website, but also that it sometimes really does pay to have a WYSIWYG editor around to save your ass when you least expect it!
That's a day in my life of web design, anyway. Personally though, I'm with Wynnefield on this one - why all the tongue-in-cheek references to people's lack of skill, or open-mindedness, or anything, when it really is just a matter of personal choice and comfort level? I use Microsoft Word instead of WordPerfect, or StarOffice, or any other competitor. Is it because I have a problem with the companies that make these other word processors, or because I have something to prove, or because I'm not good enough for the other programs? No, it's because Microsoft Word just happens to be my preferred choice as a word processor. Why sledge somebody off because they don't happen to like Frontpage, or because they do?
I just use BBedit (fear my Apple). It's just my style though; who knows, maybe I'd be more productive if I settled down with DreamWeaver or something ;-)
