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The Question: Learn HTML, Or Use A WYSIWYG Editor

When I first started designing web pages back in 1997, it was necessary for me to learn the HTML markup language. At that particular time, there were some what you see is what you get editors, but almost everyone that design web pages used raw HTML and understood how it worked. Now, seven or eight years later, we find that be market is flooded with editors such as Dreamweaver that allow anybody to design web pages as easily as they can create a Microsoft Word document.

Whenever I take someone under my wing, and start teach them about Internet marketing, and designing web pages, the first thing that I tell them is that they should learn the basics of HTML. While I recommend that they use Dreamweaver for most of their web page designs, it's always helpful to be able to go into the code view and understand what they are looking at. It also helps whenever viewing the source code of other people's web pages, to see how they did one thing or another with their code. This would be nearly impossible if you did not understand at least the basics of HTML.

Another benefit of knowing HTML is that you can go in and clean up your code. After you design a page in a program like Dreamweaver. A lot of times, there is weird formatting that goes on behind the scenes in it what you see is what you get editor. It makes it difficult, sometimes even for those of us that know HTML to go into the document, and know where we are at inside the code. However, if you understand HTML, it's easier to go in, make your code neater and more manageable, and then save it in that format so that it's easier to go in and edit in the code view in the future.

While there's no doubt that using programs such as Dreamweaver can make beautiful web pages that function fully without even going into messing with the HTML at all, I still think that it's a good practice to understand the basics of the HTML markup language and to make sure that you use it on a regular basis so that you keep this skill. Not only does it help you when you're in a code pinch, but he keeps you from being what I like to call a lazy web designer.

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