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Home > Articles > Web Building > The Joy of Coding

THE JOY OF CODING By Scott L Freshour

In the spring of 1999 I had not touched a computer since the days of BASIC on a then state of the art Apple 2C, circa 1983. With the Internet becoming very mainstream in 1999 I thought I would buy a web appliance such as Web TV so my family could experience the web and communicate via email. Turns out, the family was seldom able to get near the thing. I learned how to code simple HTML as a way to have a fancy email page. The rush of discovery for me was potent. Type in this and watch that happen. Learning how to make a table and embed a sound, manipulating graphics and building a frame. I bought a Tripod account and proceeded to code websites on a Web TV. No hard drive, no way to execute a program, I didn't know any better at the time. Every night I worked my full time third shift job and rushed home to learn more about this wonderful new technology. The day it dawned on me that I could do this and perhaps make a buck or two was an epiphany of epic proportions.

Against my spouse's wishes, I purchased a new PC and promptly scored my first freelance gig. A local accounting firm had need of a website. I installed a copy of Microsoft Front Page and beat my head on it for a week. Every time I wanted to do something, it wasn't flexible enough to produce the results I wanted. What it came down to was the fact I could hand code it faster than the learning curve required to make it happen with Front Page. As work continued to come in, I found it was always true, hand coding required something I already had, a fluent knowledge of HTML. Learning a WYSIWYG editor took time and then seldom gave me the output I desired. My attitudes about WYSIWYG HTML editors was formed early and I have hand coded every site since then.

I am now a full time freelance web designer. I spend my days looking for new work and producing quality custom websites. All by hand. Need a complicated nested table? Can do. Need a large .jpeg sliced up and put back together on the web? Can do. I am not saying WYSIWYG editors are a bad thing; only that learning the language is faster and more flexible. A site built with any of the editors out there is instantly recognizable as such. Some are very sophisticated and do a nice job; however, a program that writes the code for you should never supplant the art and science of hand coding. In my opinion I have command of a skill. Through sweat and perseverance I learned how to write code. I believe it shows up on the monitor when a user visits a site I have built.

All you hand coders out there take heart. The trend towards more powerful WYSIWYG editors and the sites they produce will likely continue. We have an edge though; our creativity can best be expressed through a firm grasp of the technologies we use and the human ways of implementing them. The machine is just a tool. It is human designers that bring the Internet to life.

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Scott "phresh" Freshour www.phreshnet.com - turning the code into gold since 1999

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