Well,
1, I _am_ an old school assembler, c, c++ and now Java programmer, an while I don't discard WYSIWYG tools because of religious reasons, I feel confortable with code.-
2, FrontPage has its own personality, and I don't like its 'coding style'.-
3, since I don't know a lot of HTML and CSS/STYLES tags/attributes, I feel that the completion tools of HomeSite helps me to learn them without pain and while I work, in fact , I learned a lot of HTML /STYLES since I use HomeSite.-
4, How much 'WYSIWYG aware'  is HTML? many Tags delegates to the browser the final presentation details.-
5, the HomeSite document browser and FTP facilities are much, much better than FrontPage equivalents.-
6. For JSP and other server side programming, the fact that you can asociate the files locations with their http URL's  is very usefull.-
 
However, I think that HomeSIte's 'design mode' could and SHOULD be improved a lot , and the same for the frameset/frames editing.- Using HomeSite, I miss the FrontPage's right button functionality, and I see no reason for HomeSite not to implement it.-
 
I think that we need tools that let us both 'design' in a visual way _and_ 'code' the 'codable' axis of web pages    
 
Regards,
Walter  
-----Original Message-----
From: A mailing list about Java Server Pages specification and reference [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of David Wall
Sent: Sunday, June 06, 1999 7:43 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: FrontPage and JSP

I installed allaire's HomeSite 4.01 for JSP, One week later, I uninstalled my FrontPage 98.-
 
Walter
 
---
 
How have you liked HomeSite?  I see that it has JSP tag colorizing, but it's not really JSP aware yet.  I am disappointed that HomeSite is stuck in HTML-land, though.  I feel like they are pandering to the "old school" that says real web developers must use HTML and not a WYSIWYG editor.  But that's a tired argument of old thinkers, like the people that thought you weren't a real programmer unless you wrote in assembly.
 
Personally, web pages should be designed, not coded, and WYSIWYGs are great for that.  I also believe that you need to know HTML, and there are many times when I have to tweak via HTML directly.  But, I do prefer to WYSIWYG editors -- just like using them to build GUIs -- it saves a lot of time and gives you immediate feedback, and you can always tweak the source when needed.  I just bought HomeSite because of the poor support from Symantec Visual Page (which REMOVEs JSP code because it thinks it knows more about what I'm doing than I do), and now I'm wondering whether I really need HomeSite -- I can use emacs for plain text editing -- and tag coloring and completion is not that significant a benefit.  Maybe I'm still missing something...
 
David
 

Reply via email to