Html Hell Week: Day Zero

Every once in a while, I meet up with a colleague, B of The Workbenj,  an avid action figure collector like yours truly, and we go on a “toy run” of sorts- we hit the hobby shops(which is some distance away from our usual haunts) and see what’s new, that sort of thing- and by afternoon, with the collectible hunt pretty much done, catch up on what’s new on the comic books and such.

Yesterday was one such day, and over afternoon coffee, I showed him the basic layout of a site I’ve been working on  (in html form, since the I was past the graphical mockup stage by this time). During the discussion, he asked on how I did it, and I mentioned working on it using a WYSIWYG.

And chaos ensues.

You see, B firmly believes that excessively relying on WYSIWYG for such work can dull one’s mind in terms of code  familiarity (Of course, really relying on the WYSIWYG mode can, but he insists even working on the code view with context-sensitive popup assists can be also damaging). To prove his point that I have been relying on such a “crutch”, he suggests going on a “HTML Hell Week”- recreate the layout again, with only a screenshot, the image assets, and a text editor- no fancy tools. As the name suggests, I have a week, although in reality I only have a working week- five days starting tomorrow- until our next toy run this coming Saturday. His final piece of advice was that I keep after-action reports of the coding progress here on the blog.

I really don’t know what to say, since the challenge came from out of the blue, and I think the layout is quite barebones compared to most (I’ll try to post a pic later) but B has been sage-like when it comes to things like this, and most things I say come back to (pardon the term) bite me in the ass later.

So yeah, an early start tomorrow, and  I have the night to work on other things…