Fancy webpage editors are nice - they allow WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design. Cutting and pasting is easy, and selecting graphics is a breeze. Some even have features that would be time-consuming to replicate by hand, such as automatically adding image HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, or searching a page or website for broken links.

Many people think learning a web editor is the key to successful web design. My advice is to learn HTML anyway, no matter how nice your web editor may be. Many web editors add useless HTML tags that cannot be removed unless you edit the raw HTML source. Some editors have bugs, making it nearly impossible to, for example, place a hard return at a certain area of a page. Most do not support every HTML tag. If you ever need to edit a template file (an HTML file that will be parsed and filled with information from a database), most HTML editors could corrupt the template. Thus, there are times when knowing and editing raw HTML is crucial.

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