WYSIWYG CSS?

by Sapphire (March 17, 2005)

In the past, I’ve written about one or two good WYSIWYG programs that help you write CSS visually, by showing you what it’s going to look like as you work. Now I’m going to talk about why none of these will do you a bit of good unless you learn CSS.

CSS is an amazingly versatile language. In it, you can choose link colors or build what looks like a heavy graphical button for your menus (but loads as quickly as HTML). You can style entire pages completely without tables, or you can just make sure your headers look a certain way. If you’re making a very simple site, you don’t need to know much. And any WYSIWYG CSS editor will do the job for you.

But by tapping into CSS’s full potential, you unleash your ability to create spectacular websites that function beautifully and load quickly. CSS isn’t an alternative to HTML - it goes way beyond that. And WYSIWYG CSS editors can’t follow.

The bottom line: you have to know CSS, and you have to make sure your WYSIWYG program doesn’t limit what you’re allowed to write. For example, Listamatic will set you up with several really good codes for making complex and highly useful menus out of pure CSS. But do they plug-and-play in a wysiwyg editor? Not really, in my experience - except for Dreamweaver, and even it can be funky.

Maybe the best way to think of WYSIWYG CSS editors is as starting points - launch platforms. Build the bare bones on them, but then move them into a text editor to really enhance the final product. If you use a program like Dreamweaver, sometimes it fails to properly render CSS in its own preview screen, even though it works just fine in the browser. So there’s really no shortcut - even with the very expensive programs out there - to figuring out the CSS on your own.

Bottom line? Use and abuse your WYSIWYGs at will. But don’t rely on them.

Posted in Development & Design
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