It was easier to write an HTML document from scratch back in the Windows XP days. All you had to do was open Notepad and start writing code, then, when you were done or wanted to test something, you’d select “All Files” and save as “whatever.html”. Open it in Firefox, have a look at it, close it and reopen it in Notepad. Windows 7 and beyond, though, complicated the process so fundamentally that it became such a hassle to do it at all, you’d have to be absolutely determined to do it. Most people just threw in and used one of the available WYSIWYG webpage editors.
Really, all that changed was, you’d need to have admin privileges to save raw code from Notepad, which was a holdover from Vista. Something about security, blah blah blah. In practise, it meant that you would have to, A) have admin privileges, and B) have a shortcut to Notepad somewhere within reach so you could run it as an administrator. If you forgot step B, you’d have to either save your file as a TXT, run Notepad in Admin mode, reopen the file, and resave it in the proper format; or run a separate instance of Notepad in Admin mode and copy the whole contents of the file in the Non-Admin Notepad and paste it into the Admin Notepad. Either way, it was just too much for me to remember as an overworked college student and so I stopped writing HTML altogether until I nearly forgot how.
I wrote so much HTML code back in the day, I thought in HTML. I could visualise what the end result would look like as I was writing it, all longhand in Notepad. I never took any shortcuts because I never had to. Back then, Microsoft Word was the stumbling block. Now, it’s the accepted standard. Anyone who’s too cheap to shell out for professional web editing software will just fire up Word and knock out the second-ugliest web design you’ve ever seen in under two hours.
Understand, I’m not opposed to visual editing tools. In fact, when I find one that works well without crashing my computer or begging me to update it every five minutes, I cherish it like my very own child. Extra points if I don’t need to read a 348-page PDF on how to perform basic operations, like drawing a horizontal line or changing the font colour. At that point, I might as well just learn Objective C and make my own damn software. If I can use a tool to make myself look more skilled than I actually am, I’ll use it forever. GZDoom Builder, FL Studio, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, these are all software that can do that. Word is not. I don’t know where people got the idea from that Word was any good for anything more complex than a timeshare rental pamphlet. Why anyone would bother using Word for web design is a genuine quandary, but I imagine the answer is “cost money”. They’re already paying the subscription fee to access the software (???), they don’t want to spend more on another subscription to another programme that has a whole new toolset and a learning curve so steep, they’d have better luck scaling the Matterhorn. And, don’t get me wrong; you can do a lot of advanced layout in Word that would otherwise take some very precise calculations and about 35 minutes of testing in raw code, but the amount of control you have over the document once it’s been saved is virtually nil. This is because Microsoft doesn’t want an educated userbase, they want an obedient one.
Have you ever actually looked at the HTML data that Word generates? The whole thing is a masterclass in yikes. The first thing you notice is some highly proprietary gibberish that comments itself out in the header code, whose purpose I can only assume has something to do with MSN’s and, later, Bing’s ability to identify webpages that were made with Word. Even if all you do is roll your face around on the keyboard for 15 seconds, performing no formatting of any kind, Word still spits out the ugliest, kludgiest, most ignoble code anyone could ever hope to see. The second thing you notice is that Word has conveniently built your install information directly into the header code, including your install name, what other install names had access to the file, total editing time, creation date, save date, and version information. But, like...Why? What possible use could that be to anyone? If you open a Word-generated HTML in Notepad for no other reason, do it to remove all that data! Good luck making any other edits to the code, though; because, unless you’re like HTML Jesus or something, most of the data cluttering up the file makes absolutely no sense. It’s only there to discourage people from editing the raw code and to make edits only in Word. Of course, the document you saved isn’t the document that you get when you reopen it; unless you saved a secondary version as a standard DOCX file, Word’s webpage generator is lossy as all hell and will present you with a slightly off-centre version of the file you remember making 15 minutes ago. That’s not really WYSIWYG behaviour, is it? That’s more like WYSINEWYG (what you see is not exactly what you get).
I mentioned before that Microsoft doesn’t want an educated userbase, they want an obedient one. They don’t want average users poking about in places they’ve decided are off-limits, and code is a big one. Computer programming in this day and age is treated as an elite pursuit where people sit in industrial warehouses, twirling pens in their left hand and typing with their right hand, coming up with impressive things every day. 40 years ago, programming was a necessary part of computer use. The 8-bit home micros, particularly the Commodore 64 and Atari 800, required a cursory knowledge of BASIC in order to get software to run. On the C64, you had to write a short BASIC programme in order to point the firmware to a disk or tape and tell it to begin reading from it. You didn’t have to build the software from scratch, you just had to tell the computer where it was and what to do with it. Of course, anyone who subscribed to a computer magazine had predetermined code sent to them every month with the intent of entering that programme into the BASIC interpreter to play that game or calculate that tip or whatever the software did; but people, being people, started to find patterns in the various programmes they entered and would discover how to modify the programme and eventually even how to write their own. Microsoft, on the other hand, has always been about proprietary installers. Their very first venture, selling BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, was about obediently purchasing the paper tape and not decompiling the code it represented. Microsoft’s bottom line does not benefit from the existence of a userbase that is casually able to write code. Certainly, there are very complicated programmes that couldn’t possibly be packed into a computer magazine for the end user to manually enter into a compiler; but HTML isn’t one of those hard-to-understand languages. Out of all the extant programming languages in the world today, HTML is the easiest to pick up from just having a look at the code. Give a usage example, perhaps, and people can grasp the fundamentals in about an hour-- it’s perfectly feasible to be a veteran web designer inside a month. If people are able to construct their webpages in longhand HTML, this runs completely counter to Microsoft’s initiative to get people to use Word for that purpose.
And the worst part of it is… Word isn’t a good web designer. I started out saying that. People who are too cheap to shell out for a professional webpage editing programme will fire up Microsoft Word and spend 15 minutes knocking out the second-ugliest web design you’ve ever seen. In this day and age where software is a subscription service instead of a product that you buy, you’ve got to shell and shell and shell for a half-decent web editor. Dreamweaver costs, what, $30 per month? Back in the day, it would have cost you $120 for a copy of the software in a box at your neighbourhood Hastings. Either way, big money.
That’s really the core of this longwinded rant. Microsoft intentionally kneecapped Notepad in order to sell bigger software packages. Create a problem, sell a solution; that’s Microsoft’s corporate motto. Whilst alternatives to Notepad do exist, they’re mostly comprised of “lite versions” (i.e. intentional removal of features or limiting of filesize to pressure consumers into buying the full version), at which point, what’s the difference between buying one of these programmes or subscribing to a web editor SaaS?
Why should I have to be bothered opening Notepad as an administrator just to write some stupid HTML? Maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old biddy, making problems where none exist just because “it was better back in the good old days, dangit!” Maybe I’m just writing this because my main disk is in the other room and I can’t access any of my files without standing up and walking across the house to get it.
--24 April 2023--