08.11.00

So they've got me working on our company intranet. Which is really kinda cool, when you think about it. BUT... (there always is one, ya know?)

I have to update it, keep it all current, etc. etc.

Not a big deal, right? Wrong.

The graphics guy here (nice guy, good artist), really really likes Dreamweaver, so I'm learning to use it, so I can see just what he does, how useful and wonderful the program is, everything. (Our other option, beyond Notepad, is to have Word convert everything over.. umm.. no. Is not an option. Have you *seen* the shit that Word pumps out? Over 100 lines of HTML for a 3-line document. Forget that.)

But, having played with Dreamweaver for a few days (I'm getting a crashcourse walkthru today), I'm starting to think it's just as bad. I'd be spending more time pulling out unneseccary tags than I would if I just went in and did the entire page from scratch by hand.

Have people forgotten that HTML is a *markup language* and not a page layout language? I mean, yes, you want everything to format nicely, and look pretty, but really folks..

I've got other things to do that mess with the Intranet, and thus, I should be able to do it in record time. No fuss, no muss. Just unadorned HTML, notepad (gack.. there are better text editors out there. I'll have to bring one from home), and me.

In other words, I want what I have with this site. Some basic knowledge, a good text editor (BBEdit Kicks Ass!), and a rough template to drop the info into. Fast, efficient, looks pretty good.

Now.. how do I tell this guy that his baby has just made my job harder, and that yes, the site design is nice, but I'd really rather do without the javascript mouseover thing, and the red bars at the top. And I'd MUCH rather do it without the assistance of Macromedia.

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Oohh... I've just converted one of our static documents over to HTML, trying to use an empty document so I have the headers & footers. That went well (though the code is U-G-L-Y!), so I popped open the file where it would be linked, and got an eyeful of impenetrable ',';',';'thing';'DooHickey';'';'img_blah_whatever_something';',';' and have offically gotten mad and really annoyed, because while the javascript has a neat whizbang! feel, it's not that important, nor is it that innovative. (It's one of those mouseover things that loads a picture in a little box somewhere else on the page. I was impressed by those a few years ago, but don't really care one way or the other anymore. It's just a waste of processor cycles.)

I wonder if I just tell him that I'm planning on maintaining the site with a text editor, and while the java thing is pretty cool, can we get rid of it, because it's not doing me any good. Unless he wants to be in charge of the project, because it'll take me more time to find the link I'm adding than it would to create the page it's linking to.