We Own the Web...

For non-techies, the WYSIWYG editors gave us a ray of hope. I found out right away that SiteBuilder and similar tools were sticky and complicated. They were easy to break. Once broken, they weren't always easy to fix. Yahoo used SiteBuilder (I think). Sometimes, what I saw wasn't what I got. There'd be big gaps between sections, maybe. (I was still hung up on the idea of designing a tight, but clean, "layout.") Not only was "what I saw" not what I got, but what I saw wasn't what other people got, either. My site still looked way different on different machines. This about drove me crazy. It wasn't that every little aspect of it had to be the same. Little tiny style differences wouldn't kill me. They might keep me awake at night, and thus shorten my life, but they wouldn't kill me. What bothered me was that my site varied a good bit from one machine to the other. Sometimes it just looked horrible. I went back to HTML right away, but it was never satisfactory. Tables were the only way I could control margins, and yet w3c and others were screaming, "Don't use tables! Tables are not meant for layout!" I didn't even understand what they meant, back then. I mean, everybody was using tables for layout. If they weren't for layout, what the heck were they for? (Oh, like scientific tables? Elemental tables? Geological tables? That kinda thing? Bor-r-r-ing!) Anyway, I couldn't understand how all these other sites managed nice, clean, brochure-or-book-like pages, but I couldn't do it. And meanwhile, all the tech gurus out there were warning me not to use WYSIWYG, not to try to control style, not to create any broken code. I mean, essentially, they were saying, "Shut up and go away. You don't belong on the Web, and you don't have a right to say or design anything. We are the techs and we own the Web!"