[jkabrg]

I'm wondering how many of the complaints here are to do with FrontPage itself, or the very idea of WYSIWYG web design.

To me, it seems that web design is a visual thing. And if so, then a WYSIWYG editor is the appropriate thing to use. I'm suspicious that some people here don't think visually, and don't see the value in thinking visually.

I don't know what people mean when they say "bad markup". I imagine it might include things like positioning elements using absolute coordinates. But I'm sure this is solvable by previewing the webpage on different resolutions, browsers and device types.

[c-smile]

browsers do the following:

By given set of HTML and CSS produce bitmap on screen. That's perfectly determined task (modulo browser differences).

WYSIWYG editor does the opposite task:

With the given bitmap on screen produce set of valid HTML and CSS declarations.

The last task is undetermined mathematically speaking - with modern HTML and especially CSS there are too many ways of get the same rendering using completely different CSS tricks - absolute positioning, floats, display:grid and flexbox etc. etc.

[stevenicr]

bad markup meant lots of things. frontpage seemed to add tons of extra fluff in the code. Other editors for a while used 1pixel cleargifs to space and align all the elements on the page. That added a lot of extra code just to move over 42 pixels and down 133 for every element.

Then using tables for layouts was better. Cutting graphics for rounded corners worked. The web purists kept posting how bad it was, web visitors never cared.

Once monitors were less standardized (more than just 800 px wide and 1024) - and mobile became a thing- the web purists really pushed to do layout with css only - and they spend years posting about hacks and recreating.. table layout called something else.

Either way lots of extra code that is certainly not needed if using the modern grid css tagging...

I still preferred the table layouts of years past, though I like the new tiny code that is needed for grid, the bloated code of the 90s and 00s is nothing compared to all the hi rez images, video and javascript bloat these days.