NYTimes hand codes their HTML | Hacker News Reader

NYTimes hand codes their HTML

nytimes.com

17 pointsedw51916 comments

And so do all professional Web designers. It's not a big deal.

Indeed. I don't understand. How else is it possible to write HTML? (without obscene disgusting things like Frontpage or Dreamweaver of course)

There are "smart" content management systems like Movable Type that let you type into a text area using "bold" and "italic" buttons like Word. When you submit, it automatically converts it to HTML.

The NYTimes designers, apparently, type everything out by hand and inject the HTML directly.

That article says nothing of the sort - it says that the designers and IAs (who are presumably the people who build the site "templates") hand code their markup, but it makes no claims about the content producers who are actually posting up stories on a day-to-day basis. They certainly use a CMS, but there's no indication of whether they author in HTML, use some kind of WYSIWYG interface or use some other form of markup.

I'm still in University taking a design degree, and most of the students, who want to get started on building websites, don't ask the teachers to learn HTML or any other languages — instead they ask: 'Can you teach Dreamweaver?'

The same happens with other areas, they ask specifically for the software, not the subject. It's the WYSIWYG generation.

That attitude should make it easy for smart employers to weed them out.

That's the reason that I left the design/art world and majored in software engineering. I was repeatedly stumping my teachers by asking them questions like "why would I use a jpg instead of a bitmap" or "which video codec is better for what we are using?" I routinely got answers like, "just use whatever one looks better."

It really starts to get annoying when you leave the 2D Photoshop/Illustrator world and get into 3D and animation design. There's so much animation that has to be automated procedurally or just makes more sense once you understand how the application actually works.

"At any given time though, my design group is working on roughly a dozen or more projects of nontrivial size, while simultaneously watching for urgent problems cropping up across a site of significant volume and breadth. That keeps us very busy. So as a matter of resources — having enough designers to take care of everything — it's almost impossible for us to implement every change or improvement we'd like to see happen."

sounds like they need to hire 5-10 more people who just focus on new things.

And they'll do that with the mountains of cash they get from their thriving newspaper business...

So should you.

I'm not sure what they mean by "hand coding". Certainly the journalists type their articles into a form, press "submit", it goes into persistence, and then eventually it's turned into generated HTML through PHP or something. That's how pretty much everything works. Nobody "hand codes" html. You "hand code" PHP.

To me, "hand coded html" suggests that they, uh, get MS Doc files from journalists and re-type the html in between DIV tags.

yeah. Khoi Vinh is a pro and so is his staff. NYTimes is a whole department unto itself. any all web company/department is going to do everything all hand coded.

I'd be more surprised if they didn't do this. (I was going to make a snarky comment about the programming.reddit auto-submit-to-YCNews bot, but...)

I haven't heard of this bot. But that sounds kind of lame

i kind of doubt it's real, but it sure seems like it is sometimes.

Given the quality of the NYTimes web site, I am not surprised that they do.

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