HTML Hand Coder with Issues | Hacker News Reader

HTML Hand Coder with Issues

5 pointslazukars7 comments

I am hand-coding the HTML for all of the pages for a stealth startup and and having issues with other people altering my code.

Pretty much when I complete a new HTML page it is sent to developers in India who eventually put the webpage live. Once in awhile these India developers will make changes to the code or they will tweak existing pages upon the request of my boss. My boss makes it mandatory that these Indian guys make changes from time to time so I have no control over these guys.

The problem lies in the fact that they are using Dreamweaver to make changes on the startup’s webpages, which as a result, screws up all of hand coded HTML and more specifically the layout of the entire page. The layout is really what is causing most of the problems. The Indian guys, by using Dreamweaver, change the layout of the page every time they do any minor adjustment in Dreamweaver. The layout may not change the look of the webpage in the browser, but it does change the CSS. This in turn screws up the layout of any of my newly added sections that I add from time to time.

So my solution, and hopefully some of you can help, is to make a template for every page on the site; a template that can not be altered by these Indian developers. This way even if these Dreamweaver guys change some code around the template is intact and so is the general layout of the page.

Now here is where some of you (I hope) can help. How do you lock an HTML template, so no one can alter it. Second, any suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance.

I had a similar experience with my hand-coded pages being nuked by Frontpage users at work some years ago. I just kept my own copies, and made all my changes to those. Anything that had been touched by Frontpage wouldn't get updated, it became a dead branch.

I would bring in changes that had happened in Frontpage, but from scratch by hand, not by importing any of Frontpage's code.

I also worked on my boss by setting up an internal A/B comparison site, where internal users could choose which page they liked better. They voted on whichever they liked, with no indication to them of which page has hand-coded and which was worked over by automated tools. When I had over 800 votes in less than a week, with 95% voting for the hand-coded pages and _all_ the user comments saying why they preferred them, I was able to get my boss to agree to keep the tools off my hand-written code for all but a couple of pages in the site.

I also wrote some scripts to generate new pages that were maintainable where there was a need to create new content on the fly, eliminating one of the big excuses for the Frontpage nukes ("You were out of the office, we had to post, and all they know is Frontpage!")

Good luck!

Generate the whole page using Javascript.

Is there no way you can convince the boss to make it mandatory that your Indian developers don't use Dreamweaver?

Up vote on not using dreamweaver. It's an amazing tool and I respect that, but it's not to be used with hand crafted files.

"How do you lock an HTML template"

Does Subversion give you an help? I don't know the ins and outs so maybe someone here could offer help. What if you checked the template out indefinitely (or for whatever time you need)? Then they couldn't check it out...

There is no way that my boss will tell the guys in India to stop using Dreamweaver. First those developers would be clueless without it. Second, for some reason my boss seems to favor using dreamweaver.

There is no way that my boss will tell the guys in India to stop using Dreamweaver. First those developers would be clueless without it. Second, for some reason my boss seems to favor using dreamweaver.

And this is why I don't worry about my job being outsourced: The vast, vast majority of these overseas firms do unbelievably shoddy work.

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