Code trumps WYSIWYG (IMHO)
I absolutely loved this post about code on eLearning Weekly, which also linked to an excellent tutorial on 30 best practices in HTML for beginners.
I am a huge fan of code. Everything I know about HTML, CSS and JavaScript comes from the excellent (and free!) W3Schools. People often ask “what do you use” and my answer usually surprises people – notepad! I am a believer in clean, basic code. I don’t like the extra “bits” that invariably creep into my nice source file when I’m using a tool. I like to be in control and I know with notepad – if I didn’t type it, it’s not in there. Certainly, the more ambitious your design and structure becomes, this is impractical, but for starting out there is no better tool than notepad (or programmers notepad).
If you have served your HTML “apprenticeship” of typing <html><head></head><body>…..a few hundred times, it will make it much easier to analyse more complex code for problems further down the line. It’s also useful when Dreamweaver or some other tool insists on inserting a line space you never asked for, to know that you want to jump into the code & simply delete the </br>, rather than fighting with the editor for 20 mins!
Check out my directory for a list of useful stuff I come across. I will keep it updated.
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