If you're not a 'professional' web designer, i see no point in you learning HTML, and if you are you should only use WYSIWYG editors when the boss says, "I need a new webpage in 5 min."

In my opinion, handcoding is meant for 'template driven' sites. You just design your template, optimize your code, and populate the template with content in its reserved spot.

Anyway most WYSIWYG editors have the option to edit the actual html source, and control any and all comment that get automatically generated.

The real power of WYSiWYG editors is automation. For example, if you have a 'template driven' site with some 500 odd pages, DREAMWEAVER or FRONTPAGE will let you change the TEMPLATE and update every page accordingly and automatically.
 

"cRaZy is co01, but sometimes cRaZy is cRaZy".
                                                      - crazyinsomniac

While I sympathize with russ, I simply have to agree with you. Automatic code generation off of a data structure is a very powerful idea. In fact one of the nice things about Perl is how easy it makes this to do.

Anyone who disagrees should simply stop and think about the process of pulling data out of a database and spitting out formatted HTML...

EDIT
I thought about it and an even better example would be something like Parse::RecDescent. Pass it a string description of a grammar. It generates a parser for you. An example of automatic code generation of Perl in Perl which has been recommended several times by the likes of merlyn.

So while I absolutely think that a lot of code generation tools are abysmal, code generation (even generation of Perl) is a concept that should not be categorically thrown away.

Each one is not hand-coded and tuned, because it just doesn't matter. If you want to take the time in your favorite editor, and hand-type each and every HTML tag, and make sure it's perfectly optimized, then you clearly have more time than I do.

In my experience, I can hand-code HTML far easier than I can deal with an "editor." The HTML will come out clean and nicely indented, allowing much more efficient changes and extensions later. It might be different if I were tasked with 300 plain HTML files with no code, no functionality.

However, I think you may have missed my point. I am addressing the "people who don't want to or shouldn't have to learn the intricacies of HTML." This may be acceptable for something simple, like HTML creation. But, do you really want people using "automatic" Perl code generators on your servers? Those people who don't want to learn the intricacies of Perl are the very people who should be forced to do so, or ask for professional assistance.

Concerning the "extra colspan," I am referring to HTML that is a few K when hand-coded, but 40-50K from some editor. They tend to put gratuitous font tags around every element, create nested tables for no reason, duplicate style information and colors repeatedly and redundantly, over and over. This mess is far from maintainable, except in another editor, where the junk may be compounded even further.

On a 10Mbps network, 50K files will download quickly. Are we willing to inflict that kind of wastefulness on an unsuspecting world (who likely do not have OC3 connections to the internet)? How long do you like to wait while Netscrape renders a pile of highly inefficient HTML? Bad HTML is a more serious problem than simple download times.

Russ
Brainbench 'Most Valuable Professional' for Perl

Well, I'm not the guy telling others what to do, but I will say it anyway.

Here in the office dreamweaver is used. This is mainly because of there are people updating the content who know no HTML. But this is changed with a content-managment tool.
But The most web-developers here also use DreamWeaver and accuse me of being stupid using a plain text-editor. But hey I'm a fast coder. I code my pages faster then them I know what I'm doing and most of the time I see what I get in my browser. Who said I type each tag? Not me I know how to use Copy&paste effective and fast.
I got no real probelm solving HTML problems, I just have to look at my code to see the problem and most of the time the DW guys come to me to solve HTML problems and I see yuckie code. One of the things I learned early is to format my code. Well, I do this with all my languages even HTML. This makes debugging often simpler.

So my point is that when you've got code-generators they should at least format the code nicely.

--
My opinions may have changed,
but not the fact that I am right

I personally use Cold Fusion Studio and handwrite my code, but by the same token, I work with developers who use Macromedia because they can tell the developer to create the page for x.x browser and to use x.0 version of HTML and x.x version of Javascript, and it puts out pretty good code.
The editors have their place in development, as long as it does not substitute thinking out your code and your goals (or thinking in general for that matter), which should be optimization and maintainability, etc.

If it weren't for these people, even with their "Hello, World" web page, the web would be a much smaller, and less popular place.

Ok, now I'm confused, your english seems to imply that this would be a bad thing somehow ;-)

Nuance Who doesn't have a web page because it would only say something banal like "hello world"

Then again, many of the functions in the CGI module generate HTML for us, and many other modules in Perl provide a cleaner user interface to some other language/system by generating the code for whatever the application is. So there is a place for it...

On the other hand, I don't think I'd really be to psyched about seeing a product that automated Perl generation...

One thing to remember about the CGI module although it can generate code,
it was written by PERL programmers, for PERL programmers.
I started out using HTML generators and they NEVER looked right.
Simply because there are too many ways to write a page to look the same.
The same is true of PERL it is too smart for one programmer or company.
Anything that generates code strips the language of it's beauty.
The craft should be left to the craftsperson.

Many of the functions in CGI generate HTML, but I suspect that most people (like myself) tend to use CGI to grab and manipulate the form input, but not to write the html. (Of course, that doesn't include things like CGI::FastTemplate, but functions lik &h1())

If all you want to do is monitor changes, log what's been done, and stuff like that, what's wrong with something like rcs? Of course I don't know what this program does, but I'm curious what it does that is so much better than the free tools.

Yes! And also take a look at CVS. Really cool stuff ... I use it all the time, even for my personal projects, configuration files and writeups.

Andreas

where can I find this?

--BigJoe

Learn patience, you must.
Young PerlMonk, craves Not these things.
Use the source Luke.