I had a conversation recently with someone struggling to build their first e-commerce site. They were using a WYSIWYG software package that actually prevented the developer from changing the HTML. (He did find ways to change his HTML using other programs, but as soon as he did that, his WYSIWYG package could no longer work with the HTML.

This WYSIWYG package was one of those that not only uses a lot of proprietary tags in the HTML, but it also stores your site in a form OTHER THAN HTML! That takes away from the whole beautiful set up that you have on the web. You have HTML files and CSS files that are purely text files. No magic, you really can see what you get there. It really serves no purpose to store your site in another format. And I’ve heard horror stories about what happens to your site if you try to upgrade your WYSIWYG software or if the file becomes corrupted.

I was looking at this fellow’s site. He was showing me the troubles he had when he actually sold an item. There was nowhere within his WYSIWYG software that he could indicate a quantity - it always ASSUMED your quantity was 1.

So what happens if he sells an item? My first instinct, of course, is to change the quantity. Well, we can’t do that. Idea two is just to delete the item. Makes sense, especially if you won’t have more of it to sell in the future. But, all of the items for sale are laid out in a table - four items across, and however many rows are needed. So if you delete an item, you’ve broken your table structure. All of this is static HTML (even if you can’t change it, it ultimately HAS to be HTML), but with tables, if you delete a cell, you have a mess. The other items won’t shuffle to fill the space. You just have a broken site.

The puzzling thing to me about this is that there are many long-time web developers who say that tables are so much easier than standards compliant HTML and CSS.

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