[sperry]

Originally Posted by Dean

If you honestly believe compilers create code as good hand coded assembly, you are fooling yourself. And don't even start me on what happens when you use the word "Include".

Dean, I will guarantee you, if you were to develop something in ASM, you would get your ass handed to you by a compiler in terms of performance. Modern processors are so complicated these days, and incorporate so many pipelining tricks, caching algorithms, etc, that unless you knew every last register like the back of your hand (like the guy that wrote the compiler ) you can't approach the efficiency of the compiled code, especially if the person running the compiler knows what they're doing. No one uses ASM anymore, except for simple critical code that runs on an old processor. Hell, event the guys doing in-card 3D graphics have high level languages these days.

Also, I haven't typed "include" in like 5 years... what happened in a 1990's C complier is totally irrelevant with today's development suites, high-level languages, virtualized machines, multi-core processors, distributed architectures, etc. Programming these days is about leveraging existing libraries, not about fitting the executable on a single HD floppy.

Originally Posted by Dean

And if the results of a "Save to web page" meets the needs of the person choosing to use it, it does work, car analogies aside.

Like I said, if I write a web page in Word, in the browser it better look exactly as I designed it in Word, or Word has failed as a WYSIWYG editor. Just because people are satisfied with broken software doesn't mean the software isn't broken.

Originally Posted by Dean

HTML is code in this analogy, and word is the compiler from a higher level "language" no matter how good or bad it is.

Nope. In that analogy Word is the development tool, HTML is the output binary. The "higher level language" is Word's internal XML format, and the compiler is the "save as" function that converts the XML to HTML. That conversion in Word is less than piss-poor.

Sure, writing a web page in Notepad (or any raw text editor) is akin to coding in assembly, and I know it's not for everyone. But a decent html editor uses a browser for previewing (so you know it's accurate) and generates pretty, hand-maintainable, HTML. Word is the absolute *worst* choice for HTML generation. The whole point of HTML (and *any* markup language) is that it's human readable. Word completely defeats the purpose of the standard.

Originally Posted by Dean

Again, you may not like the old site, but it worked. and the old index.html file was 755 bytes. And the total page including graphics was under 60K

The old RenoSCCA site was slow and unmaintainable. Perhaps you don't remember the life cycle of system development, but it ends with "maintain". If you can't maintain the site, it doesn't "work". Remember, that site isn't your personal webpage, it has a very well defined goal of acting as a line of communication between the board of directors and the general membership. If the board is unable to change the information on the site at will, then the site has failed its purpose. Because it takes so much work to maintain, and because it can only be maintained by individuals with significant technical skill, the BoD cannot use the site as they require. I would say that makes the site a failure.

Edit: I just noticed the numbers in that quote... Your index file was a frames container... it could have been 100 bytes instead of 700+. Plus, you had to download all of the framed pages to get the content, which was almost 30k just for the top, navigation and main pages (and that's *after* I stripped and pruned main.htm down from over 45k itself!) and doesn't include the size of the link images.

Your site required the transfer of at least 250k (again, not counting images) to get the same pertinent data that I've got in under 18k of text in one index.html. Including my 7k in images images, I'm still 10 times more efficient.

Originally Posted by Dean

Many thousands of web pages are developed and maintained in Word, FrontPage, Nvu, Excel, etc... whether you like the results or not, they work. You can choose not to use GUI editors, that is your prerogative, but those tools work for many, just as your C# or other compiler works for you.

Like I said, I'm not suggesting that hand editing HTML is the "best" way. If I were a professional web developer I certainly wouldn't hand edit, I'd use decent tools (like I did when I was a professional web developer). But Word is the worst... absolute worst... way to maintain a website, followed closely by FrontPage. And what the hell is Excel doing in that list? To bring back the car analogy, using Excel for web authoring is like entering a golf cart in the Indy 500... sure it's got a motor and four wheels, but it's the wrong tool to race 500 miles. Just because something saves to HTML doesn't make it a useful tool for editing HTML.

Markup language bloat is a real-deal issue. I see it everyday with the piss-poor XML based protocols we have to code to. We're going to see real-world bandwidth issues in the field because people in decision making positions have decided on tools and methodology without understanding the underlying technology. I bet those people use Word to edit their homepages too.