Just the other day, Eric Meyer announced that he has been working with WebAssist to create Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor. It’s a Dreamweaver Extension that assists users in creating clean markup and CSS. While this seems like a vast improvement over previous WYSIWYGs, it still feels like one.

Why Do I Feel This Way?

While it’s great that this would mean that there is less crap code out there, people are still basically using forms to generate the markup and CSS needed. They still are not learning anything about web development.

One thing I saw in the plans for future releases was:

There are some things I expect will be improved in future releases, like shorthand value minimization—the simplest example of that being a condensation of 0 0 0 0 down to just plain 0.”

Wow, if that’s not going to confuse the hell out of people who don’t know CSS, I don’t know what will. Imagine trying to add a margin in, so you add margin: 10px 0 10px 0;, then it gets condensed to margin: 10px 0;. It kind of seems like you would be confused as to why it wouldn’t accept the values that you were adding. Unless they give some sort of alert telling the user that this is what is happening, they will definitely be confused.

They won’t know the different between margin and padding.

They still may use blockquotes to indent their text.

It just seems like crap.

Users are still going to be choosing from a template. Do we really want the web to be built on templates?

What are the Ramifications

As I was thinking about this writing this, I was reading a post at entitled “Will Software Ever Make Us Redundant?”.

I think this post really got me thinking about how even though the WYSIWYGs are getting better, I don’t ever think that humans will become redundant in Web Design/Development. The human mind is just too creative and amazing for a piece of software to ever be able to accomplish the same thing. Think about all of those wacky IE6 bugs.

I don’t know Mr. Meyer, with all due respect, it kinda feels like you sold out on us.

It’s Still a Stinking WYSIWYG