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OpenTechSchool / html-css-beginners

A friendly, afternoon introduction to html and css.
opentechschool.github.io/html-css-beginners/
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Why not use MS Word? #25

Closed xMartin closed 10 years ago

xMartin commented 10 years ago

This is actually two questions:

So the current answer is not sufficient.

joanwolk commented 10 years ago

Why not use a visual editor? Visual editors exist, and some people use them. This is sometimes referred to a "what you see is what you get" editing, or WYSIWYG. In the long run, it can be limiting to use a visual editor because there are ways of changing text that are faster and easier to specify manually. It also limits your ability to understand what's happening on the page if you only use generated code from a visual editor.

Why not use MS Word as a text editor? MS Word has a lot of formatting information that can't be understood by the web. The way Word knows where to put a paragraph (or bigger font sizes, or a picture, or anything) is totally different from how HTML and CSS work. For code of all kinds, including HTML and CSS, it's important to use a text editor to keep your code clean. In addition, text editors provide some hints about what pieces of code you have where. This is called syntax highlighting. It's like having the nouns in red and the verbs in blue in a sentence.