Do web professionals use WYSIWYG editors? (was Wyiwyg)

Do web-professionals often use wyiwyg editors in combination with hand coding or do they mostly just use hand coding? and what tools do they use? Just a text editor with some helpful things like syntax highlighting or are there others tools they often use?

Thanks in advance.

You seem to be asking about WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors.

I strongly disapprove of them in general. If you can't make a web page without one then any pages you create with one are very likely to have poor quality.

Here's a recent thread where we discussed this.

As to other tools, I suggest you read Tips on Debugging Layouts.

Usually the websites are dynamically created. So that means a design template has to be created and properly broken up for whatever dynamic webpage generation mechanism there is. Relying purely on Wysiwyg then becomes an impossibility. Professionals need to be able to work directly with the code.

Semantical HTML markup doesn’t rely on WYSIWYG, because what you are doing is simply indicating the structure of a document (headings, paragraphs, etc.). For CSS work, once again, a WYSIWYG editor can’t do this for you. Doing CSS properly means you need to by hand be able to create proper code that works on a variety of browsers.

Whether you use an editor with WYSIWYG capabilities, or just a plain text editor with good indentation and highlighting capabilities, ultimately:
- WYSIWYG is most useful in the prototyping, draft phases, where you need to see a design rather than have proper code and markup.
- The final code that gets used in the page templates is done by hand. WYSIWYG editors have a show code option, so what matters is how good their code editor is. The choice of editor is usually a personal one.

What’s more useful actually may be running a personal webserver or having access to a test box, and a good suite of browsers and extensions. Firefox and Firebug are freely available, but very much depended upon. There are some other Firefox extensions that are pretty useful for development. Opera is also pretty useful.

Theres nothing wrong with it, if you know how the code work.

I use Dreamweaver to quickly build my framework, then I just go into the code view and get rid of the Dreamweavery code.

So dont listen to anyone who says "WYSIWYG SUX0RS!". As long as YOU dont, you're fine.

That said, a lot of people think they can drag and drop in a wysiwyg, they're designers, and they're not.

All in all, learn to code, but use tools that can speed you along.

I use dreamweaver to design my sites in. However, I use it only to speed things up such as to throw a table in...instead of having to type the long html out just click the add table button and its done for you. It just saves time but it wont make your website look any better.

Removing the crap that WYSIWYG editors add is more work than just making the layout yourself. You have absolute control over every detail all along the way if you do it from scratch (or start from a template that you keep handy).

I detest WYSIWYG for their sloppy organization and nasty css/markup. If you're experienced, you should be able to build the basic template with ease in less than an hour in most scenarios.

That being said, WYSIWYG will most likely improve with time, and not always be a pathetic sack of donkey-lump. Then, I'll probably have a different opinion.

If you want to speed things up, use snippets with code completion. You tell your IDE "When I write <table, and press tab, please input the full markup for a table." Snippets are much better than GUI-tools.

This post is completely biased, and in no way is meant to appear "neutral"