I know several FreewayTalk forum members who started out with Freeway Pro, or some other visually oriented web development application, who, after time, have progressed to the point where they now hand-code all or most of their websites.
So I have to ask the question, why do hand code websites and isn’t doing so a lot more time consuming?
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There could be any number of reasons, be it personal choice or perhaps a requirement. For example, maybe your employer requires it or maybe you collaborate with others that have specific needs. Or maybe you like to have absolute control over every aspect. The list goes on and on.
Sure it takes longer than having the code generated but for some that’s a small compromise when you need the control of writing it yourself.
Todd
So I have to ask the question, why do hand code websites and isn’t doing so a lot more time consuming?
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You cannot assume that code is a one-size-fits-all thing… or that the code
FWP writes is unquestionable or “perfect”. Sometimes it is easier to write
the code you want than try to get Freeway to write the code you want.
Honestly though, you are still a long way from hand-coding a whole website.
For where you are at, just learning what code is, how it works, and
importantly imo, how to recognize the relationship between what you do in
Freeway Pro and the code it generates. At that level, FWP can be a great
learning tool for those who want a safe way to learn how to code.
–
Ernie Simpson
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Todd email@hidden wrote:
There could be any number of reasons, be it personal choice or perhaps a
requirement. For example, maybe your employer requires it or maybe you
collaborate with others that have specific needs. Or maybe you like to have
absolute control over every aspect. The list goes on and on.Sure it takes longer than having the code generated but for some that’s a
small compromise when you need the control of writing it yourself.Todd
http://xiiro.comSo I have to ask the question, why do hand code websites and isn’t doing
so a lot more time consuming?
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Also Kelly, it’s a highly marketable skill. Should you choose to venture into the corporate world again or decide to pursue bigger, higher-profile clients with more demanding and complex needs you may find that hand-coding is an essential skill.
Todd
http://xiiro.com
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Good point. Thanks guys. And yes Ernie, I’m admittedly not ready to begin hand-coding yet. I was just curious.
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My initial reason to reach beyond Freeway was because I was doing more and more with dynamic sites – database-backed server applications that generate an HTML site. My first many such sites were done using Freeway and Actions and lots of Item/Extended and Page / HTML Markup insertions in the “nooks and crannies” of the page. I did this because I wasn’t sure of my skills writing the HTML and the PHP or ASP (shhh – don’t tell anyone that’s what I first used!) at the same time – especially in the bad old days of IE 5.
Freeway was an enormous teaching tool, as my earliest sites were done by me designing it, then throwing it over the wall to my programmer partner who would write some ASP right into the generated HTML, and then send it back to me to “cut up” and put back into Freeway so the code would survive client design changes. Having to pick through his code in BBEdit, figure out where in Freeway’s design view the actual HTML I was squinting at was generated, and then slip just the code things into Freeway’s candy shell, gave me a journeyman’s education in how to build a solid HTML page.
When I started dipping my toes into bigger projects, both in PHP and Ruby, I started to work in applications where the layout code was highly factored – lots of little pieces assembled just-in-time by the server, depending on the actual database values in the current request. This sort of thing is barely possible in Freeway – the first version of the Softpress site that I built, and the Softpress Store (both in 2003-4) were built this way, using Freeway and a lot of separate include files authored in BBEdit and stitched together with custom Actions.
When I got into Ruby on Rails more deeply, all the cool kids were using TextMate for their programming, and I jumped in with both feet. This editor is much more than a plain-text editor – it’s an entire programming environment unto itself. You think that Actions are cool? This thing takes it to the most extreme conclusion you can imagine. TM plugins are written in any language you like – Python, Ruby, shell script, PHP, Objective C – and have access to the entire application interface at the extreme end or are like TextExpander snippets at the simplest end. You start with templates that write out all the boilerplate for you, then as you’re typing along, you can use tricks like type ul followed by a tab, and you get an entire list framework ready to go. But deeper than just a simple expansion – if you press tab, you cycle through the classname, the id, and into the first list item. Type some text, press tab again, and you jump to the next line. Type li and tab again, and you get the next list item. That’s a ridiculously simple example, the stuff in the Rails plugin is frankly scary how “smart” it can appear (looking up the database columns to know what values to add when you type a shortcut).
So the more you do, the more you learn, and the more flexible you want your tools to be. Freeway is an amazing launchpad into the depths of HTML and beyond. It’s taught me so much, and none of it was completely wasted. I would really love it if the language of the interface was made more conformant to the actual language standards (leading should be line-height, f.e.), but once you make the connection in your head, it all makes sense.
Walter
On Nov 27, 2013, at 10:26 AM, RavenManiac wrote:
I know several FreewayTalk forum members who started out with Freeway Pro, or some other visually oriented web development application, who, after time, have progressed to the point where they now hand-code all or most of their websites.
So I have to ask the question, why do hand code websites and isn’t doing so a lot more time consuming?
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That’s a great story Walter. Thanks for sharing it.
I think my biggest challenge is running a full time company AND trying to learn things like HTML, CSS, PHP, etc. I’m getting there, it’s just taking me longer that I’d like.
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But maybe the future of webbuilding will be for the drag and drop cloud services. They become better all the time and if we compare it with other software designers use (like Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator,…) the evolution is not that we go deeper into the technicality of the software but more into the application of different effects, not knowing at all what happens behind te scenes of the software. Just a thought. But I 'm interested to know what you all are thinking about how the webbuilding applications will evolve.
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I agree that drag-n-drop cloud services have gained footing the past few years and are valid and impressive solutions for basic sites but that’s only one small segment in a much larger and complex ecosystem. For small stuff sure, but it’s a sliding scale and for the people building complex, feature-rich, bespoke sites (which are more web applications than websites) I just don’t see how such things could ever be built without custom work; there will always be a need for people who can function at that level. It’s relative to the task as to how far you can or will be able to go with drag-n-drop. As the tools for building have in some respects become easier to use the Web has also gotten far more complex.
I for one hope that day of everything being drag-n-drop never comes because where’s the pride of craftsmanship in that kind of future?
Todd
But maybe the future of webbuilding will be for the drag and drop cloud services. They become better all the time and if we compare it with other software designers use (like Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator,…) the evolution is not that we go deeper into the technicality of the software but more into the application of different effects, not knowing at all what happens behind te scenes of the software. Just a thought. But I 'm interested to know what you all are thinking about how the webbuilding applications will evolve.
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On 28 Nov 2013, 2:33 pm, Todd wrote:
I for one hope that day of everything being drag-n-drop never comes because wheres the pride of craftsmanship in that kind of future?
That depends on what you want to be pride of. I want to be able to make tools that help my client to achieve his business goals. If the making of these tools can be made more simple, faster and therefor cheaper than I’m pleased with that. I agree that there are professional standards but for me they are situated on the quality of the communication. But what I mean is that when I started a long time ago we worked with markers and we made roughs, we had to order our typesetting and we had to calculate the corps, letterspace, wordspace, etc. We knew how to draw things, we had no stock images. There was a lot of technicality we were very proud of we mastered. But that’s all gone and we moved on to other skills. Designers today don’t have that knowledge and skills, but that’s ok. But even then my focus was on the quality of communication. I mean, the more the technicallity is ‘automated’ like in the drag and drop solutions, maybe the more we can concentrate on what the websites and other apps must DO and less on how they do it.
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I think both mindsets/skills are necessary to the overall process but I still wouldn’t want to see the building process automated to the point where it removes a thinking, problem-solving person from the equation, which I don’t see happening, at least in my lifetime. At that point I’m just flying a drone which is of zero interest to me, I’d rather be outside digging ditches. But hey, that’s me. I still think it would be a valuable skill for Kelly to possess in today’s market. As for the future? Who knows.
Todd
I mean, the more the technicallity is ‘automated’ like in the drag and drop solutions, maybe the more we can concentrate on what the websites and other apps must DO and less on how they do it.
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As someone who came up in GD with the very old tools (missed learning to drive a hot-metal Linotype by one year – my high school sold it for scrap!) I am actually very much in tune with your feeling here. I feel sorry for the people who never ran a press, or a process camera, or kerned type in a Typositor, and who thus missed the opportunity to gain a feeling for how things work at an organic level. Of course, I am truly glad that I don’t have to restart my Mac every few hours to deal with font issues, or save before every print to deal with QuarkXPress’s legendary instability under Mac OS 7. You win some, you lose some.
There is a danger in any setting to decide that “what you already know” equals “what a newcomer must learn first”. You earned your stripes, and you expect anyone else coming up to put in the same hours you did. I well remember how angry I made the (disciplined, experienced, well-trained) engineers at Medical Broadcasting Company in the late 90s when I showed them a drawing of what I wanted, and they assured me it “could not be done”, and I whipped out a prototype in Freeway to prove that not only could it be done, but it wasn’t even complex code-wise. They really hated me for that.
I am looking forward to what happens with Macaw and other code-first “visual design” tools that are coming to market as we speak. I know that they will spawn a whole bunch of newbies who will make my poor efforts with stone knives and bear skins look as primitive as they truly are. Yes, I can code a page in TextMate almost as fast as you can code it in Freeway. Yes mine may be more semantically correct. No, that probably doesn’t matter. Yes, you can change your layout faster than I can – you’re not invested in the code at all. But mine can be carved up into micro-templates and assembled by Rails into a dynamic site. I need that flexibility for the kinds of sites I build.
I guess it’s a merry-go-round (carousel) – where you get on isn’t very important, as we’re all going in the same direction. It’s an interesting time to be learning. But then it’s ALWAYS BEEN an interesting time to be learning. The key is to keep learning.
Walter
On Nov 28, 2013, at 11:05 AM, Gerrit wrote:
On 28 Nov 2013, 2:33 pm, Todd wrote:
I for one hope that day of everything being drag-n-drop never comes because wheres the pride of craftsmanship in that kind of future?
That depends on what you want to be pride of. I want to be able to make tools that help my client to achieve his business goals. If the making of these tools can be made more simple, faster and therefor cheaper than I’m pleased with that. I agree that there are professional standards but for me they are situated on the quality of the communication. But what I mean is that when I started a long time ago we worked with markers and we made roughs, we had to order our typesetting and we had to calculate the corps, letterspace, wordspace, etc. We knew how to draw things, we had no stock images. There was a lot of technicality we were very proud of we mastered. But that’s all gone and we moved on to other skills. Designers today don’t have that knowledge and skills, but that’s ok. But even then my focus was on the quality of communication. I mean, the more the technicallity is ‘automated’ like in the drag and drop solutions, maybe the more we can concentrate on what the websites and other apps must DO and less on how they do it.
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I was working on this earlier, and thought it might serve as an example of how hand-coding can be faster and superior to Freeway Pro
http://cssway.thebigerns.com/products/strangecolors/
This was quick and easy to set up in FWP. However, when finished I started to look at how I might improve it. So I started planning an immediate overhaul.
The first thing I decided was the layout wasn’t semantic enough. There was a header and a footer with the appropriate elements, but the content was just a pile of boxes… what meaning did it infer? The more I looked at it, the more I decided it needed to be a list.
Okay, that was doable - I’d done that before so it’s not impossible. Freeway Pro can be wrestled to do that.
Looking at the code, I decided the next thing I wanted to improve was to remove as much as possible all of the redundant or excess code that FWP invarably generates. There are several instances where similar objects share the same properties and it would be much more efficient to style them by class group instead of by each individual id, which could be better utilized for their non-common properties. The result would be leaner, more efficient and pleasing code. Getting FWP to cooperate with this plan, however, would be way more difficult - if not impossible.
After an hour of wrestling with Freeway Pro, I began to notice how unrecognizable the workspace had become - which isn’t unusual when you are trying to get FWP to do things that are not in it’s normal repertoire. That’s when it struck me how much extra time and effort I was devoting just to beating FWP into submission. And then I had a thought.
Even if I succeeded in making Freeway Pro do what I wanted, it would be so much faster and easier to just hand-code the whole thing from scratch.
Let that really sink in a minute.
Okay, I thought. Let’s try it. So I did.
http://cssway.thebigerns.com/products/strangecolors/handmade/
Hand-coding has its shortcuts too - I have a library of snippets and stuff that I can copy/paste/edit… I used Coda 2 which has auto-complete and a host of it’s own guns. So it’s not the burdensome effort everyone thinks it is. And the result looks very similar - but with better semantics and leaner code. I’m still wrestling with whether I should have used a definition-list instead of an unordered one… but I suppose one baby step at a time.
By sharing this here, I’m hoping to contribute to the conversation about hand-coding and perhaps some perspective on what we consider “simple” or “complex” with regard to our tools.
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50 years ago when a man bought a car (women didn’t buy cars then) you better knew something about the mecanics of a car. You were a kind of a fool if you didn’t. That changed. Later it was ok if you didn’t knew that much about the mecanics (but you still were expected to change a flat tire yourself) and you took your car to a shop with real mecanics. They knew everything about every technical part in your car. They were not very interested in the design and the esthetical elements of a car. That was for women. Today the mecanic connects your car to a computer that tells him what needs to be fixed. He doesn’t repair a thing. He changes the broken part and trows away the broken one. We can think that it’s a sad evolution that even the mecanics don’t really know anymore what’s under the hood but in the end all we want is to drive. You know what I mean?
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What Gerrit and Walter describe is actually true with computer programming as well. We’re probably all familiar with the story about how Woz built the first Apple computer. It used to be that you had to know almost that much to use those machines, much less build them.
With the Mac before Mac OS X, when you wrote a program for them, you were responsible for the “event loop.” The event loop is where you look for user input such as cursor movement, keyboard input, etc. Now, no one does that, not even JavaScript. But before the GUI, if you wanted to do anything like that, it was up to you to even draw anything on the screen. Each generation of programming removes more of the lower-level stuff that you have to do. Every time that happens, some programmers who have been around a while complain that new programmers don’t get to learn how to do what they did.
OTOH, I’ve met people who want to learn to program the Mac who talk about wanting to start with the really low-level stuff like I describe above. While desiring to learn stuff that deep is admirable, it’s a waste of time IMNSHO unless they’re going to write operating systems or close to the iron. Even game programmers nowadays are focused more on APIs than hand-coding low-level stuff. Most programming environments now give you all the foundations for free, and you can focus completely or almost so on what makes your program unique.
What I’m finding interesting in this discussion is how many of the people who are long-time Freeway stalwarts are talking about needing to hand-code to get serious web work done. I’m wondering what this might mean for the future of Softpress and Freeway. I also wonder how possible it would be for SP/FW to keep up with this ever-evolving web world.
To be honest, one of the major reasons I stepped away from web development as my primary occupation was because I got tired of keeping up with the changes. Like Walter said, you have to keep learning. I guess I felt like what I had to keep learning didn’t interest me, and I also felt like there was lots and lots of relearning as things weren’t evolving so much as getting replaced and making me start over. To compare it to computer programming, I might describe it as the transition from Mac OS 9 (Carbon-style) programming to Mac OS X (Cocoa) programming, over and over again. I felt like I kept having to learn the basics over again instead of getting work done.
I wonder where Softpress sees Freeway in all of this.
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That’s an interesting line of thought.
The people who buy cars aren’t the people who build cars… they only need to
know how to operate them. They can choose to do their own maintenance,
though the skillset required is somewhat more complex than it used to be. I
think this is also true about people who buy websites.
Now the people who build cars don’t need to know much if anything about how
they work either. Factory workers aren’t required to know anything beyond
assembling a component or part of a vehicle… which is I think interesting
because some website builders are just that - assemblers. They assemble
websites.
Engineers must know something about how cars work… or at least how the
subsystems of a car work. Both generalists and specialists are required,
they rely on extensive math and science skills to solve problems and
regularly incorporate developing technologies as they develop and refine
how components and systems work together. I think much the same is true of
the explosion of web developers we have today - each specializing in
specific sub-fields. Like auto engineers, their knowledge is important but
so is their experience - the knowledge they have gained through practice.
Auto designers drive the whole process of auto manufacturing, so you would
think they must definitely know something about how cars work. However, I
know this is absolutely not true. They don’t go to mechanic’s school or
learn science or math – they study Art.
Or, more specifically, they study Applied Arts - which is the process of
melding function and beauty as a concept. I know this because in my early
years I had some association with the Art Center design school in
California, whose automotive design department is still famous for
producing the best and brightest designers for the automotive industry.
These are the folk who create the concepts the engineers must fabricate and
that factory workers must replicate - all so that the people who buy cars
can do their part. Web design is also an “applied” art - it can stretch the
limits but still must recognize the world of practical facts.
I like to end the story there, mostly because I favor the idea of artists
as Heroes and wish to simply ignore anything contradictory. (Yay, artists!
While I think this automotive analogy has been very illuminating with its
parallels into the web world, it occurs to me that most of us here are not
pieces in some giant corporate web-building analogy… we are more like
individual garage mechanics… working in our own shops, combining all the
roles - designer, developer, assembler… even salesman and sometimes
consumer. So we really have to know a little bit of everything (or have
access somehow to a little bit of everything), while using our own drive
and ability to compete with giants. Hmmm… as much as I like artists, I
really love underdogs. Go l’uomo universale!!
–
Ernie Simpson
50 years ago when a man bought a car (women didn’t buy cars then) you
better knew something about the mecanics of a car. You were a kind of a
fool if you didn’t. That changed. Later it was ok if you didn’t knew that
much about the mecanics (but you still were expected to change a flat tire
yourself) and you took your car to a shop with real mecanics. They knew
everything about every technical part in your car. They were not very
interested in the design and the esthetical elements of a car. That was for
women. Today the mecanic connects your car to a computer that tells him
what needs to be fixed. He doesn’t repair a thing. He changes the broken
part and trows away the broken one. We can think that it’s a sad evolution
that even the mecanics don’t really know anymore what’s under the hood but
in the end all we want is to drive. You know what I mean?
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Ernie,
You may not know that I used to be an engineer for GM. I was an engine guy, although my computer savvy got me to work on engine management systems there. (These are the computer systems that monitor and control the engines.)
I worked with guys that developed the catalytic converters. These guys were all chemical engineers. They knew nothing about how engines worked. To them, an engine was a black box that output various gaseous compounds such as hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitric oxides. It was their job to convert these compounds to less harmful ones. OTOH, I’m a mechanical engineer, and to us, the catalytic converter was a black box that took in the engine’s emissions and mysteriously changed them to the better ones. At best, we tried to work together to give the other guys what they needed, but we had to count on them to do their part without us understanding too much about what they did.
As far as automotive designers, there has to be some collaboration between the designers and the engineers, otherwise the designers can design stuff that’s really slick but technically impossible. This is similar to what we’re seeing from Apple. Ive can design some really neat stuff, but it often takes a while before they can actually manufacture an iPad that’s this thin yet has 10 hour battery life, is so fast, and strong enough to withstand some impacts.
It’s interesting to see what people can do on their own like the web developers you mention vs. the big corporate giants. Some people are producing their own records in much the same way.
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So, to answer the initial question. It depends on your personal interests. If you prefer the technical side of web/app building and like to work more complicated projects in the future you should dive in the code after a while. If you prefer the design/communication side you should look for tools that make you design/communicate better and faster and understand how people use those apps and communicate in general. Both fields are evolving very rapidly nower days. Understanding what you are doing will never harm you. Any which way you choose.
Thank you guys for this very interesting conversation.
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