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If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

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Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#31

Post by jrockway »

ido wrote: post #29
jrockway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to optimize for other people's productivity, that's fine. But that's not what's best for you . Also, there is a simple solution to this problem -- a program that converts $foo into HTML and a program that converts HTML into $foo. pandoc is an example.

Which me? Me the business owner that hires both web designers and programmers? Me the team leader that needs to manage a heterogeneous group of people, each with a different skill-set? Me the one-man-shop (and programmer) who outsources the design work? If I have both web designers and programmers on my team having them communicate can most certainly be my problem (or at the very least a problem I am gravely effected…

If only you had hired people that could learn new skills.

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#32

Post by studer »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #27
crazydiamond wrote: post #15

When i want to code HTML i use HTML.vim (for vim of course). Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy. I'd be interested in knowing if this is available for some OS X editor (pref a free one) and whether they have vim support. (Cant recall if TextWrangler is free)

>Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy. I hope those shortcuts are writing CSS?!

Doesn't look like it:

http://www.infynity.spodzone.com/vim/HTML/HTML.txt

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#33

Post by ido »

jrockway wrote: post #31
ido wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which me? Me the business owner that hires both web designers and programmers? Me the team leader that needs to manage a heterogeneous group of people, each with a different skill-set? Me the one-man-shop (and programmer) who outsources the design work? If I have both web designers and programmers on my team having them communicate can most certainly be my problem (or at the very least a problem I am gravely effected…

If only you had hired people that could learn new skills.

You can say that about any new tech, but truth of the matter is that there are certain advantages to using well know & widely used tech.

I'm not talking about zen-coding or pandoc or any tool specifically, you can make the same argument for e.g. clojure vs java: as much as you'd like to use the shiny new tech, you must at least consider the fact that it's a hell of a lot easier to find x new programmers that can use java proficiently than even x/10 that can use clojure proficiently.

It doesn't mean it should be the overriding deciding factor, but the cost of retraining/learning should at least be taken into account when making that decision.

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#34

Post by netghost »

crazydiamond wrote: post #15

When i want to code HTML i use HTML.vim (for vim of course). Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy. I'd be interested in knowing if this is available for some OS X editor (pref a free one) and whether they have vim support. (Cant recall if TextWrangler is free)

I've seen it implemented as a binary, so VIM can call it (I think someone wrote a plugin already). There's a version for textmate that works quite well.

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#35

Post by philfreo »

crazydiamond wrote: post #15

When i want to code HTML i use HTML.vim (for vim of course). Of course, you have to memorize some keystrokes such as ";bo" for bold. or ;fo for font or ";fc" for font color etc, but these are really easy. I'd be interested in knowing if this is available for some OS X editor (pref a free one) and whether they have vim support. (Cant recall if TextWrangler is free)

http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/

Towards the bottom is a pretty long list of what it's available for.

There are several OS X apps it supports, but Aptana is the only free one I believe. It's quite good if you can deal with how big of a program it is - you should check it out if you haven't already.

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#37

Post by vcrash »

veeti wrote: post #28
jrockway wrote: post #9

There's a reason why C compilers aren't implemented as editor macros that convert what you type into assembly, as you type it. It's because a high-level programmer never wants to work at that low level; he should never see the lower level. Ideally, he shouldn't even know that the lower level exists. (When was the last time you debugged your CPU microcode?) If something is so cumbersome that it needs to be abstracted…

I'm not sure I understand your point: Zen Coding just makes it easier to write HTML (like autocompletion in an IDE) instead of translating it into some other language (like your Assembly example).

The point is that, while Zen Coding is easy to manipulate (C), it's being converted to something hard to manipulate (Assembly) as you go, making it challenging to go back and rearrange things.

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#38

Post by gamache »

nostrademons wrote: post #8

The thing I don't like about all these ways to "improve" HTML/CSS is that they all seem to assume the rest of the webapp ecosystem doesn't exist. Take SASS's variables and arithmetic, for instance. I agree that CSS desperately needs some way to abstract out common values. But any decent webapp will already be using some sort of template system, and the template system will have some sort of variable. Why not use it a…

You could do CSS in a templating system, sure. First off, you'd want to cache it, but that's a solved problem. And you'd be well served to cook up some subtemplates/helpers/whatever that automated away some of the drudgery. Pretty soon you'd have more ideas on how to keep your CSS more maintainable, your subtemplates would become more general, etc.

At this point you have implemented most of Sass/Less/etc but you have a bunch of templating gunk, less documentation, and hundreds fewer eyeballs looking at the code. Or, you have not implemented most of Sass/Less/etc and you are still writing CSS like a chump.

Re: If you code HTML, Zen Coding will change your life

#40

Post by Shorel »

jrockway wrote: post #9

There's a reason why C compilers aren't implemented as editor macros that convert what you type into assembly, as you type it. It's because a high-level programmer never wants to work at that low level; he should never see the lower level. Ideally, he shouldn't even know that the lower level exists. (When was the last time you debugged your CPU microcode?) If something is so cumbersome that it needs to be abstracted…

I see HTML as very easy to read but bothersome to type.

You really can't compare the level of complexity of HTML vs. assembler or microcode, especially as HTML has no control structures like a for, a while or a setjmp.

Now, if HTML were not so easy to parse-at-a-glance, then you could had a point.

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