How often have you seen ads for Front End Web Developers where they advertise that, upon accepting employment, the applicant must ‘hand code’ their sites, without the aid of Dreamweaver or HTML editors?

Here’s one I saw a few months back, in the Webstockers Friday jobs edition:

• Modern, efficient X/HTML and standards compliant hand written coding (we don’t use Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG editors, etc)
• Photoshop – ability to originate/manipulate graphics for web

I see this far too often, really, and it always bugs me.

Why are they so pro-Photoshop? Why not write “we hand draw our graphics pixel by pixel (we don’t use Photoshop to originate/manipulate graphics)”.

Come on people, that anti-Dreamweaver attitide is so 2000. Dreamweaver is a development tool, and as such it’s up to the developer to use it correctly.

I build standards compliant sites, and I use Dreamweaver. I handcode in Dreamweaver, no less. Go figure.

I use Dreamweaver for its ability to introduce efficiencies into the coding process, e.g.:

• auto tag completion,
  to save me typing out the same code over and over
• code colouring,
  to help my tired eyes scan for mistakes
• built-in reference material (as well as Google)
• file organisation,
  in particular the file linking and the FTP synching
• Dreamweaver templating,
  for clients that do not have a budget for CMS development
• automatic code formatting,
  (indenting etc)
• find and replace,
  across multiple files
• integration with a test server
• fast preview in multiple browsers

Using Dreamweaver does not mean that:

• I am going to build every site using tables
• I am going to drag and drop all manner of Adobe JS/AJAX widgets that I do not understand into my site
• I will rely on the little browser checker to do my testing for me
• I will rely on the design view to do my testing for me

When it comes down to it, you’re advertising for a person to do a coding job because you can’t do it yourself. Why not let them decide which tools they want to use?

P.S. I handcoded this myself in the Blogger editor. Woohoo.