A friend of mine just asked what I use to code my web sites and I triumphantly stated that I use Dreamweaver, a program that I deem one of the most fantastic pieces of software I’ve ever owned. Anyway, having told him this (and using the ‘hot’ emoticon on MSN) he told me a quick story of how his friend (who is a year younger than me, apparently) uses Notepad to code his websites. This was subsequently described as “cool”.
Now, I want to make something really clear here; coding with Notepad does not make you cool. Making more work for yourself is not cool. Being counter productive is not cool. Using Notepad for some sort of warped credibility does not make you cool. Notepad is not and never will be a productive environment to code web sites. Even on the very basic level, it lacks line numbers and coloured code, how can that be considered useful?
I do use Notepad2 quite a bit, for editing straight from Filezilla because it’s pointless to get Dreamweaver open to make a small edit but the key point here is that Notepad2 (and a plethora of other text editors) support coloured code and line numbers (oh my!), basic features that Notepad doesn’t provide simply because it was never really made for coding web sites.
So, if you’re coding your web sites completely in Notepad, please think again. It’s not cool and its not clever. Your reasons for doing it are warped and, to be quite honest, quite sad. If you wish to look clever, I’m sure there are better ways of doing it than coding web sites through the most laboured method ever created.
Filed under: Uncategorized, dreamweaver, notepad, rant, web design