10 Reasons I hand-Code

1. I believe it’s better to learn to do something rather than to learn to click buttons. One expands your mind power, the other will turn you into a mindless zombie that drools on the keyboard and howls at a full moon.
2. There is no joy like creating clean well-structured reusable code and optimized applications.
3. The web has become a connection graph and a page can often be made of pieces from all over the web – including Twitter and Facebook integration; JQuery, AJAX, JavaScript Libraries; Google Map, Picasa and flickr Integration – this can’t be done with a visual editor.
4. While this has much improved over the past few years, no visual editor can create pages as small and light as a skilled hand-coder.
5. HTML editors can add a lot of unnecessary code that can slow your site down. One client sends her organization’s newsletter to me that’s made with a popular software program. The last newsletter was 110k before I removed the unnecessary code, and 35k after I optimized it. That’s three times smaller so it will download three times faster.
6. You can learn to make your pages exactly as you like, rather than settling for the closest an editor can make them to what you want. When I produce a web page template, I decide exactly what is will be absolutely-positioned, which will be floating, which will be stretching. I instruct the page to set certain boxes at exactly so-many pixels in size. I have total control over every little element.
7. WYSIWYG often add a level of obfuscation. When you need to make changes to the layout of the site, it’s very easy if you’re familiar with its code, and this can save time, and provide you more control over the change you’re making. When you find code bits you want to add, some of these programs won’t let you add it. They will remove what you added or will change the code to what it “thinks” you meant, which breaks the code.
8. When something goes wrong, as they sooner or later will, if you don’t write the code you won’t know how to find and fix the problem.
9. Some editors use proprietary code, which means they have to be placed with hosts that offer the correct proprietary server extensions. That’s not necessarily a problem, but it can be.
10. Using an HTML editor limits what you can do to what the program can do, which is often not everything you’d like.