dwárrow_delf said:
but I wish I could edit a php page like I can an html through the show design view mode. Ah well.
As an aside, I always see people looking for some sort of "visual" IDE for PHP. I don't understand this desire. What would it look like? How do you represent a for() loop graphically? How do you represent a function definition graphically? You
can't.
Some things you could do in a more WYSIWYG fashion, maybe, like class definitions, but in the end, you'd
always end up writing
some code by hand, and I think obfuscating that process with a point-and-click interface would just create a lot of frustration and slow down design cycles.
I already use a PHP editor (see above) that has syntax highlighting and function insight. How much more hand-holding do we need?
WYSIWYG design
does have a place, of course, and that's in creating visual interfaces. That's what we have Dreamweaver MX for (even though I still code my XHTML and CSS by hand) and what other languages, like Visual C++, have interface design IDEs for.
I think that's enough.
By the way, dwárrow_delf, this rant wasn't intended as an attack on you at all, and I hope you don't interepret it as such. It's just that I think that the desire for visual design tools for languages like PHP (which contain concepts that simply
cannot be represented visually) is so irrational, and I think if people would think about it, they'd realize that attempting to dumb the process down to the point-and-click level is pure folly.