Old Code is Rough

I have to admit that editing pages that were written in presentational HTML by others authors is really starting to be a pain. CSS and XHTML is such a clean way to code that it makes it so much easier to follow what’s going on. I’ve taking over a website for a client, and while we are in the midst of trying to design an entire online community for their new site, I continually have to update and make changes to the old code which was created in Dreamweaver. I don’t mind Dreamweaver for the most part, there are some compelling tools in it that give it some serious advantages and can speed development. However, for me Dreamweaver is just the wrong tool, mostly because the rendering engine just don’t render anything close to any of the modern browsers.

I’m pretty much in a constant mode of what I guess can be termed as Code & Reload. I code in Coda mostly and then test in Firefox. I do some changes in the built in preview of Coda, but because it uses the Safari engine, it doesn’t quite give me an accurate look for Firefox and IE, but it’s generally close. So what I end up doing is code in Coda, then reload the page in Firefox until I get it where I want, then I fire off VMWare to check it in IE 6 and 7 and then start tweaking to get a good balance of functionality and design that works consistently across the browserverse.

I’m sure that with the move toward Ruby on Rails development this will only increase until someone builds a good IDE for Ruby on Rails that includes a good rendering engine (webkit or moz). Not that I’m complaining. This is pretty much how most of my GOOD websites have been built over the years. It’s how to make good websites work.