Screw the WYSIWYG
Visual Studio .Net, oh I hate you. Let me count the ways… Seriously, though. It is pretty obvious that Visual Studio .Net was designed for designing Windows applications first and web applications were a definite afterthought. To be fair, the VS.Net IDE would be good enough for developing native applications. For web-based projects, I just do not see how anyone can stand it. I tried. Oh my goodness, I have tried. However, even when developing a web application, VS.Net uses absolute positioning for laying out everything. It is still very reminiscent of Visual Basic 5 for goodness sakes. A glance at the “HTML” source revealed a plethora of non-semantic mark up that would make the W3C drown in tears.
Backstory: I have finally finished the redesign of the web application I inherited when I moved over to the desktop software support team. Lately when anybody came to my cubicle and asked about the Software Request Form, I’d reply with “Yeah, it’s ugly.” The interface was riddled with boxes and boxes, red type, and frankly it was just ugly. To be truthful, the guy who developed it modeled the design after my own for the hardware team, but this took it to another level. The new interface is more clean, aligned, and capitalizes on the adage, “Less is more.”
Okay, now to connect these two paragraphs somehow. I designed the new layout in a plain HTML file with an external CSS stylesheet. After seeing what I liked, I had to integrate that into ASP.Net and C#. After numerous attempts, a gajillion thoughts of where VS.Net can stick its compilation errors, and a instigating crayon picture of a penguin launching a raid on a certain Redmond facility drawn on a Frisch’s Big Boy™ placemat, I ranted my ordeal to a good pal. Thank you, Lonnie, for introducing me to MasterPages. After quickly reading up on them at 4 Guys from Rolla, I created my first template using this technique thusly seperating the static content from the dynamic. Much better. Much easier. I still had to deal with the WYSIWYG… or did I? This time I put my faith into The Force and hand-coded all of the HTML or ASP.Net equivalent myself. I did check back into design mode to compare with the old form so I didn’t leave out any pertinent values. One of the important things to me was that I managed to keep the layout seperate from the content. It was an interesting battle. Visual Studio may have whipped me yesterday, but today I am victorious. Look who’s laughing now! Is it utter blasphemy to hand-code everything in a WYSIWYG editor? Honestly, I do not care one bit. At least there were lessons learned and my triumph over Microsoft ingenuity will not be forgotten.
