OT: HTML queries (was Re: PDF datasheets)

[Gordon JC Pearce MM3YEQ]

Cameron Kaiser wrote:

> Hand-coding isn't just a good idea for learning HTML, it really causes people
> to make leaner documents. People forget that HTML is, as its acronym implies,
> a markup language. When people use a page designer, they tend to forget that.

Using "page designer" software is one of the glaringly obvious ways to 
make your page scream "CACK-HANDED AMATEUR!" at the reader.  The amount 
of bloat and cruft and Just Plain Wrong markup that they introduce makes 
the resulting pages slow to load, slow to render and indeed in some 
cases just not render at all.

No-one - I repeat, *no-one* - uses page designer-type software for 
serious, professional websites.  Neither do they tend to use hand-coded 
static HTML pages, except on very, very small sites that are never 
expected to change.

More typically, you'd design a page template, perhaps using Lorem Ipsum 
instead of "real" content but basically resembling the finished page. 
Then the website backend will replace marked blocks of text with the 
real content, pulled from a database.  This ensures that the look and 
feel of the site is consistent across all the pages, and navigation can 
be built automagically by the backend.

Since it's generally simpler to do this for all but the most trivial 
sites, I don't think I've written a static HTML page intended for 
production use in years.

Gordon