photo credit: estherase

WYSIWYG

Mother always said, “You cant judge a book by its cover”.  The same applies to websites.  “What you see is what you get” editors can lay a website out to your liking.. most of the time, there is a greater problem which remains hidden away.  WYSIWYG editors do not make people readable code.  Software like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and other programs allow you edit a page without ever touching the code.  These software packages are considered “What you see is what you get editors” (WYSIWYG).

Whats the big deal?

photo credit: Jeffrey Beall

Think about an office desk, one all the files are stacked in neat piles with labels, and the other looks like a hurricane swept through leaving documents and files everywhere.  Which person would you like fill in for?

The Bigger Picture

More importantly, search engines like cleaner code.  They have a harder time making their way through jumbled code. Which makes it harder for you to rank high in Google and other search engines.

Examples

WYSIWYG Editor

<strong>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<a href="index.html">Projects</a>
</span>
</strong>

Human

Html

<a href="index.html">Projects</a>

CSS

a {font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;}

You can see the html page is cleaner (easier to understand) and the CSS portion makes loading faster.

_{»crosslinked«}

Tags: code, hand coding, wysiwyg

Category: CSS
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