[whatwg] Microsoft Expression Web

[Mihai Sucan]

Le Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:30:15 +0200, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com>  
a écrit:

> Microsoft released Expression Web yesterday:
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-web/features.mspx
>
> The narrator for their video for "Standards-based Web Sites" says "XHTML
> builds upon the HTML standard that allows a larger percentage of  
> browsers to
> properly parse and display your document."
>
> I'm wondering if you guys seeing Expression Web as a Good Thing(tm) for  
> the
> web, or a Bad Thing(tm) for the web?

I'll be harsh: it's a Bad Thing™.

No matter what people do, they'll never get such tools The Right Way. It's  
pretty much impossible, without AI.

Lets take an example: (Adobemedia) DreamWeaver. It's one of the best (if  
not the best) tool for web development, WYSIWYG editor, etc. It's slow,  
bulky, and the code it generates is really bad. I do not like DIV-itis.  
The code gets worse in bigger/complex sites..

Microsoft Expression Web can't be light-years ahead of DreamWeaver. It  
might be better, but not much. They spend ridiculous amounts of time on  
developing tools that are pretty much getting in the way of really doing a  
web site The Proper Way™.

They probably even made Expression Web in such a way it really generates  
valid XHTML code. It's not that hard: close the tags, properly nest the  
tags, use lowercase attributes and tags, use quotes for attributes, and  
forbid the use of tags and attributes not allowed by XHTML. Is the code  
good? No. Invalid code can be of a higher quality.

As for the quote you've provided: I think it does confirm my harsh  
comments.

I'll stick to vim/emacs/notepad/gedit/kate/whatever (currently using vim).



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