neurotwitch

Finally figured it out

Was going nuts trying to figure out why Movable Type breaks every time I make a change to the template. Then I remembered colleagues complaining about how the spacing in their code (for ASP pages) changes after I open them for tweaking with Dreamweaver. So I set DW not to change anything in ASP pages and the complaints stopped.

But the MT template isn't an ASP page. And I have DW set to automatically render everything in lower case to comply with XML standards. So, when DW opens a page, it converts everything it reads as a tag to lower case. So it would read the cgi call as an html tag since it's set between < & >, and convert it to lower case whether I want it to or not. And therefore break MT because MT is case-dependent. And I have to go in and re-do all the tags. Which takes time.

So now I have to make DW stop changing anything when it opens any page - it sucks, to have a feature that's potentially handy be pretty much damaging instead of useful. I liked it because it would make the html tags uniform - helps when more than one person is working on a page. But now it's more trouble than help, so I'll ditch the feature.

DW is starting to remind me of Microsoft Word - many more features that I could possibly ever use, bloated, and too much potential for damage.

But I like DW because it quickly builds in the code if you need it, such as for mouseovers and dhtml, and because there are a lot of handy extensions to go with it. But if I have to keep the code pure, I'll stick to Arachnophilia - which is STILL the best html coding tool I've ever used. (OH DAMN! I just read Arachnophilia programmer Paul Lutus' note - the next version of Arachnophilia will run as a java program. So it doesn't have to run in Windows, he says. I wonder if it will run well or if it will be a slow pain in the ass like most java programs are?)

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