8.6.2.1. Pros and cons

Many professional HTML coders shun web authoring tools, preferring the "pure" experience of creating HTML documents by hand using only a full-featured HTML editor. Others appreciate being spared the grunt work of typing every HTML tag and find the WYSIWYG environment useful for viewing the page and making design decisions on the fly.

If you do choose to use a web authoring tool, don't expect it to excuse you from learning HTML altogether. In many cases, you will need to do some manual fine-tuning to the resulting HTML code. There are a few pros and cons to authoring tools that you should consider.

The pros include:

• They are good for beginners. They can even be useful for learning HTML because you can lay out the page the way you want and then view the resulting code.

• They are good for quick prototyping. Design ideas can be tried out on the fly.

• They provide a good head start for creating complex tables and other advanced functions, such as JavaScript and DHTML functions.

• They offer considerable time savings over writing code by hand.

But also keep in mind these cons:

• Some programs are infamous for not generating clean HTML documents. They add proprietary or redundant tags and often take circuitous routes to produce a desired effect.

• Some editors automatically change an HTML document when you open it in the program. They add their own tags and may strip out any tags they do not recognize.

• The code these programs generate may not conform to the latest HTML specifications.

• The built-in graphics-generating features do not offer much control over the quality or the file size of resulting graphics.

• They are expensive. The more powerful packages cost hundreds of dollars up front and additional costs to upgrade.