use Perl

Today I spent all day at work labouriously going over the so called xhtml that Macromedia Dreamweaver produces. Every page produced by my colleague had to be checked and cleaned, then tested in Opera and Mozilla. Mostly I was removing unnecessary and invalid mark-up, and fixing errors that IE ignores, but sane browser react too.

I didn't touch his many-nested-table designs, but in sections of the site that come out of Perl/XSLT, I re-wrote his mark-up from the ground up in clean modern xhtml, with clean cascading style-sheets, rather than the multitude of tables and "one style rule per object on the page" approach of Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver, FrontPage et al. have two obvious problems:

1. You don't have to think. This means that you don't experiment, and you don't learn anything. This results in old fashioned and inefficient designs, because the author never tries anything new.
2. Automated GUI tools produce fairly poor and bulky xhtml/CSS. If you let them do JavaScript as well, often when xhtml/CSS would do alone, you get verbose and buggy code. Thus the pages you get are larger than they should be, and slower to load.

These GUI tools may be good for rapid prototyping by visual designers, but they are lousy if you want your pages to be tight and correct.