i grabbed the chance to ride my bike this morning and got in 40 miles, for the first time in almost two weeks! there’s another storm coming in, so my next chance to ride may not be until next Thursday. oh, woe is me.

so. issue 100 of A List Apart is out, with an article by Ben Henick titled Back To Basics, which touts the importance of being able to understand and work with the code behind your web pages. i think he overstates his case a bit, and is a little too hard on visual design tools like Dreamweaver — which I’m convinced can greatly speed up the development process if used correctly.

actually, I’m only talking about Dreamweaver, and only version 4, which will leave your code completely alone if you configure it the right way (turn off indenting and line breaks, primarily), and also includes quite a few features specifically designed for hand-coding, like automatic tag completion. as for GoLive and FrontPage, feh. Both produce bloated, weird code with non-standard tags and other abominations.

back to Henick’s article, there’s no doubt that being able to code by hand is a tremendously valuable skill. but a designer who knows how to hand-code and also knows the capabilities of Dreamweaver can zip through the dreary housekeeping work of building a page, then move to hand-coding for the final cleaned up product, and at least in my experience, get more done in a shorter time. look at the source for this page; i think it looks very readable, it validates, it’s commented, and it’s certainly not bloated — and it was built with a combination of Dreamweaver and BBEdit.

if you don’t know what’s going on in the code, though, Henick is correct that tools like Dreamweaver can lead you into producing tangled, matted chunks of ugly HTML. and we all know how painful that can be.