[plug] HotDog

[Peter Wright]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 04:59:20PM +0800, skribe wrote:
> On Sun,  3 Feb 2002 16:27, Peter Wright wrote:
> > You're missing something.
> 
> Would you care to enlighten me, or are you quite content being a prig?

Breathe man, breathe! :)

Sorry skribe, I didn't mean to offend. I thought the implied humour of my
lack of any specific reason would be noticeable. Oh well, chalk another up
on the "my bad" list.

*pete chalks up another on the list, which is getting rather full
now, bummer, may have to get a new chalkboard*

Slightly more seriously...

To some extent, you could say this is a variation on the age-old
"integrated development environment" versus "pure text editing environment
with perhaps some useful scripting/macro features" discussion. As is
probably the case with quite a few people here, I much prefer the latter
for reasons of flexibility. However, a _lot_ of people prefer the former as
it tends to automate a lot of stuff they just don't want to have the bother
(or take the time) of dealing with - which generally translates to making
things easier.

This does not, of course, mean that one group is "better" than the other in
any way, shape or form. You could certainly say that one way is more
flexible than the other, although if someone is not able to make use of 
said flexibility then it's actually _not_ more flexible from their point of
view. Generally, you will find that one way is "easier" than the other way
- although again, people of different backgrounds have wildly different
views as to what is "easy". I find the Borland C++ Builder IDE an absolute
pain in the arse at my work environment, but most of my cow-orkers :)
couldn't imagine life without it.

With regard to what _specifically_ you may be missing... um, well... hmm...
let me see if I can think up something....

1. Project Management(?...)

   I suspect something like HotDog would have a visual environment that
   makes it easier to keep tracks of dozens or perhaps even hundreds of
   static (or not so static) HTML files, CSS files, graphics files, Java
   applets, Macromedia cr*p, etc, etc...

   Something that a disciplined person could handle to _some_ extent with
   intelligent directory/file naming and layout - but an intelligent
   project manager, especially one specifically oriented towards web site
   management, could provide a lot of bonus features here.

2. What-you-see-is-a-rough-approximation-of-the-structure HTML editing

   Just because Microsoft Frontpage specialised in producing shithouse
   nonstandard HTML (at least in its early days, not so sure about now)
   doesn't mean that all other similar tools do too. And some people simply
   prefer a visual sort-of-WYSIWYG editing environment - and it _can_ make
   some things (like managing a hell of a lot of messy elements in what
   would probably be an unnecessarily complex HTML page) a lot simpler.
   
   Perhaps simpler than it should be, I agree. If you're going to produce a
   horrendously complicated web page, you should know what you're doing.
   *wry look*

3. More coherent handling of site meta-data.

   For example, common headers/footers for certain groups of pages.
   Overall look/feel and structural management.

   This is something that could (and in many cases, should) be handled with
   some sort of meta-HTML like WML, etc... but isn't (well, not always).
   And then what you can end up with is reuse by copy-and-paste, which is
   always a bugger to maintain.

   Note that I've used manage-headers-and-footers by copy-and-paste on my
   own pissy little website - and hence you can easily tell where I've
   added a new page and just forgotten to add the headers/footers. Or where
   I've made a look/feel change that has not been propagated through all
   pages as it should have been. Little things, things that don't really
   matter on a personal site, but things that can really bite you in
   <random sensitive body part> when dealing with a larger, more important
   site.

4. Technical help and hints.

   Okay, every _real_ man knows precisely the subtle distinctions between
   the different HTML/XHTML standards, and where one tag is valid and
   another may not be standard but is in common use, etc... but a good
   website IDE-ish tool can help a _lot_ with this sort of thing. Not that
   I specifically know any that do, I'm running on assumption a bit here :),
   but consider the sort of thing that some guy (sorry, can't remember your
   name, whoever you are) asked about on this list a while ago - if there
   was a C/C++ IDE or editor for Linux that could handle
   function-tooltip-help - eg. you start writing

     strncmp( 

   and a little tooltip would pop up telling you what parameter types are
   expected for that function. Now something like that just can't be done
   with Vim (in its current form) - it'd require a bunch of extra features
   and some sort of integration into the appropriate API documentation.
   Which would perhaps be inappropriate in a general-purpose editor such as
   Vim. However, that sort of thing is _eminently_ appropriate in a
   language-specific IDE - and could be extremely useful for general HTML
   and web development.

> skribe

A lot of these things are the sort of stuff that you or I might choose to
handle with a combination of CVS, WML, ispell and a bunch of
cobbled-together scripts. However, if there was a general all-in-one tool
that could manage a lot of this stuff by itself and provide a lot of other
useful functionality (that you may not even have known you'd find useful)
along the way... well, Vim is a bloody fantastic editor, but one of the
reasons it's a bloody fantastic editor is that it doesn't try to be another
Emacs. ;-))


Well, I hope that sort of covers what I was thinking. Feel free to point
out all the holes in my arguments, I'm sure there's heaps.


Pete.
-- 
http://akira.apana.org.au/~pete/
One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is...  If they do
foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little.
		-- Joe Martin