TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
RE: GUI vs Hand, Was: estimating the cost of building a web si te
Subject:RE: GUI vs Hand, Was: estimating the cost of building a web si te From:Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- jci -dot- com To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Tue, 30 May 2000 17:23:28 -0500
> "In light of the capabilities of some GUI web-authoring
> programs, it is no longer fiscally responsible to code web pages
> by hand anymore."
Sounds like Dan Shafer.
He's got a point. Not that WYSIWYG tools are perfect, but that it's quicker
to rough out the pages with one of them, then hand-tune where necessary,
than to hand-code from the ground up.
Let's face it, 90% of the hand-tuning we do has little impact on the
performance itself. I know a guy who religiously removes all "</p>" tags
from a page, because they are optional and therefore it slows down the
download to have them in the page. That's 4(!) bytes per paragraph; is it
possible that's even as much as 1% of the page's content? Which means that
if the page loads in 15 seconds (really long load time) it should only take
14.85 seconds after this operation. Yeesh!
If all the ugly code the advanced tool adds to the page amounts to 5% of
the page, that's a download penalty of .5 seconds on a 10-second page, just
about at the threshold of visibility for the average viewer. Yet that same
tool might save hours on developing a page, and perhaps half the penalty
can be recovered in a matter of minutes with a competent editor (or perl).
I rarely build a complete page by hand anymore. In the old days of
programming, you had to code assembly to get good fast programs. As the
state of the art of compilers advanced, you let the compiler spit out
assembly code that you hand-optimized where necessary. Now it's rare that
even that step is necessary. HTML tools are following the same path.
Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224
Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
----------------------------------------------
In God we trust; all others must provide data.
----------------------------------------------
Opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.
If JCI had an opinion on this, they'd hire someone else to deliver it.
