Bob Adkins wrote:
[snip]
For 1 thing, most older people simply aren't inclined to take on such
a steep learning curve. I'm not ready to exclude such a large segment
of people. Many smart people are dyslexic at coding (and spelling for
that matter), and need a "crutch". I see nothing wrong with that.
It's better to walk with a crutch that not walk at all.
I used to code exclusively with a text editor, but get frustrated with
tables. I'm not a purist. I consider anything that reduces my coding
time and frustration a useful tool, and I'm not too proud to use it.
Quite!
Decades ago, I programmed computers in assembler. (And I could bootstrap from
the keys, and use a handpunch, correcting the cards by re-inserting the
chads!) I moved up from there to "high level languages" (several of). Then to
macro systems & declarative systems & logic programming. Now I use
applications where possible to hide all of that. Let other people worry about
it! I'll take their tools and use them. I want to work in the "solution
space", not the "implementation space".
I currently use DW4 for HTML, but often have to do things by hand. I use
notepad for CSS. What I really want is that within 5 years my (X)HTML and CSS
is untouched by my hands, and preferably unseen by my eyes. They are primitive
code that human beings should not be troubled by - except for the few who
provide tools for the rest of us.
There is no merit whatsoever in knowing the character-level coding of tags,
attributes, rules, properties, values, etc. At the very least there is a level
of abstraction above that which might know that (say) "paragraph" exists but
doesn't say what it looks like, or that a text colour may be mid-green without
bothering what the property & value for that are (and how they are encoded).
Tools could eliminate the possibility of unnested-tags, syntax errors &
finger-trouble at the atomic-construct level, etc.
But WYSIWYG techniques can work at a much higher level than that. The fact
that they have tended up to now to generate dodgy output doesn't mean that
they always will. Just as today's compilers are much better that those of a
generation ago. We need our best brains to develop high quality back-ends for
those tools.
What is the real "solution space" that we should be working in?
