

Are webdevelopers elitists? - edwinm
http://www.bitstorm.org/weblog/2011-10/Are_webdevelopers_elitists.html

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bad_user
The article is setting up a strawman.

Writing HTML, CSS and Javascript is indeed hard, but editors like Muse suck
even harder nonetheless.

My wife, who works in a kindergarten and has no ties to computer-science, can
write HTML. It is indeed hard for her and she doesn't really grok it, but she
can do it nonetheless after a short course she took in college.

Another example - a client of mine wanted a simple CMS. I cropped up something
quickly in Django - it had a WYSIWYG editor. The person writing articles would
copy/paste articles from MS Word; needless to say the copy/pasted articles
looked like crap and even though the editor itself did a pretty good job, it
was a futile job trying to correct the formatting afterwards. The fix for that
was disabling the WYSIWYG editor altogether and replacing it with a Markdown-
enabled plain text-box. So she could no longer copy/paste anything other than
plain text; and it was painful watching the transition, but it was OK in the
end.

Sometimes the right answer for the shitty status quo we are in is better
education not more shitty tools. There are good reasons for why web developers
absolutely hate WYSIWYG tools for writing HTML, you know.

Also, if you treat your users like idiots, they will be idiots.

    
    
         Eventually Muse might even created better HTML 
         than a hand coder
    

No, it doesn't and it never will, mostly because of HTML's design.

------
potatolicious
The problem with Muse is that it doesn't solve any problem better than
existing solutions.

The pure spaghetti code is generates (along with the requisite _explosion_ in
payload size) makes it practically useless for any large website where the
quality of the code, size of payload, latency, and bounce rates actually
_matter_.

So that leaves the "non-serious" website market - homepages, simple blogs,
etc, where these concerns are significantly muted, if not entirely irrelevant;
but that's not what Muse is targeted at. Not to mention, there are _many_
competent tools out there already that do the same thing without (as much)
rampant spaghetti output (see: Dreamweaver, FrontPage, along with a myriad of
others).

The objections I hear against Muse aren't people objecting to Adobe's
"violation" of their puritanical, text-only, hand-crafted HTML aesthete. It's
objection against a horrible solution.

> _"Eventually Muse might even created better HTML than a hand coder."_

So, because Muse might eventually, in some future state, produce acceptable
(or even good!) output is supposed to shield it from criticism?

In that case, I'd like to drop all of my criticisms of local politicians.
Because, you know, in some future state, these guys might actually know what
they're doing.

------
intellection
Kindly, maybe a retitle, a contextual reframing would angle yourself a more
positive approach?

Elevating emotions with class warfare within a general community is direct
politic.

I believe you have a better muse.

