Jay Small has written a great newsletter on why you should learn HTML if you don’t know it already and should create your sites using “raw” HTML instead of a WYSIWYG editor like GoLive or Dreamweaver.
I created an early version of MediaSavvy using GoLive and it just made me miserable. Not only was the code it to created too complex, but the program itself was way too hard to use.
Now that I’ve gone back to hand-coding my pages using BBEdit, I know what’s going on under the hood, my pages are smaller and lighter, and it’s actually easier to tweak them when I need to.
Now that more users and designers are using templates and style sheets, it makes even more sense to use HTML. Once you start working with style sheets, you’ll find there’s a logic and flow to working in HTML that you didn’t have when you were doing your layouts with tables.
There’s something about editing raw HTML templates that requires you to keep things simple. I think that the result is better-looking pages that are actually less complex for the reader to understand.