Your Software Can't Do It All For You

The question many Baby Boomers are asking at this stage of their lives is "Where is my flying car?" We were promised a great many things by media of the 1950s and 1960s. Cars would fly. Robots would run our households. Entire meals would be just pills. Supersonic airliners would, in less than a day, whisk us away to faraway lands anywhere in the world. We would vacation on the Moon. So where are the flying cars?

Like most great ideas, the execution is much harder than the inspiration. Quite often we can only get close to the original idea. I think we've about come to this point in the evolution of a lot of our software.

You can boot up the most powerful word processor in the world, but unless you know the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation, and have a good imagination and a knack for storytelling, and even then, it is unlikely we will ever be able to just generate a novel at the touch of a button.

Web work is like that, too. You can know everything there is to know about the <p> paragraph tag. How to use it, how to modify it with an ID or a Class, how to string together all kinds of attributes and even three different ways to invoke the tag from your keyboard. It still isn't going to make you a great writer.

We have some very powerful tools in Dreamweaver. On the Design side, you can now look, in CS4 release, at your actual page in an actual Web browser in Design View now, because Adobe have switched to the WebKit engine for rendering Design View. You can outline block-level elements in Design View to call better attention to them—something I have been doing for years using CSS when I got confused.


But there is nothing in Dreamweaver that will automatically generate wonderful markup, full of Accessible Design considerations and the best practices developed over the last dozen years of doing this—or prevent you from using harsh colors, or from hiding all of your navigation at the bottom of the page, or keep you from designing navigation that can't be used on some fractions of your visitors' computers.

I mention Design here specifically because I have always felt it was one of my own shortcomings. And in my job, I mostly deal with Templated pages, so it is really difficult for me to get any better, because new designs only come along every several years. I have to make a conscious effort to pick up a book or read a Design Web site because this element of Web work just does not appear in my ordinary work day.

You can learn a lot from books. I know, I have. But there are any number of things you have to actually do to get any better. There are books about playing guitar. There are books about dieting. You can probably read a dozen different titles for either example; But reading those two dozen books will still not make you an expert guitar player and it won't make you thin, either. You are going to have to do the other work, too.

There is something about Web work that makes you uncomfortable. Probably, this is because you know your expertise is lacking in this or that area. That's fine. But this is an ever-expanding marketplace, not an ever-expanding technology. The HTML or the XHTML you use today has its roots in the early 1990s—even earlier if you go back to the original SGML markup language.

You can learn it all. Absolutely. But the real benefit comes from learning it all and using that knowledge, building on that knowledge and expanding that knowledge with elements of Design, color theory, e-commerce, programming and dozens of other fields.

The software is good. Even the Version-One program was a terrific piece of work. But we are not now and we may never arrive at a place where the software, alone, will ever be able to do the entire job for us.

Let's get to work.