If five years ago you told dynamic website designers that technologies less WYSIWYG than Flash were going to be the new standard, they would have laughed you out of the room. I mean, asking a designer to learn bare-bones ActionScript was bad enough, but man, things have changed. With the ascendancy of JavaScript and JavaScript libraries such as jQuery (my choice), MooTools, et al., designers are faced with a choice: retreat further into Photoshop mock-ups, or delve deeper into coding.
I personally know designers who take umbrage at the notion that they should have to hand-code anything—HTML and CSS often included—much less learn JavaScripting techniques. Some hope that Dreamweaver will finally fulfill its promise to be the Photoshop of web design and not remain a barely-above-par site builder that spits out crappy code that they have no ability to parse. Alas, that day seems even further off than it did mere years ago. But the scales are slow to fall from designers’ eyes, and they are clinging to the comfort of what they know, rather than tackling what they should learn.
Also, it’s commonplace now (and I’m certain that on some level this will persist into the future) for the designer to hand their beautifully rendered Photoshop comps to “coders” and let them do the heavy lifting (this has led to the misguided notion of creating “pixel perfect websites.” It’s a terrible idea, but that’s a topic for another day). But when one is talking about dynamic websites, static comps only go so far. Motion, animations, and transitions: are these things designers feel comfortable surrendering to others? I, for one, don’t want to cede control, or to be told what can or cannot be done by an outside party who may or may not be telling the truth.
The cold hard fact is that coding is inherently more nimble and flexible than a WYSIWYG editor is, or most likely will ever be. It can address problems as they crop up, and at the speed change happens on the web, waiting for Dreamweaver CS6 is hardly an option. So what’s next? Will you plug your jQuery into a WYSIWYG editor and create dynamic sites that way? I doubt that will happen anytime soon. Rust ain’t got nothing on technology when it comes to never sleeping, so it follows that, if we wish to continue doing web design, neither can we. Oh look, jQuery just released a new version, I for one, will be hitting the books.
