Finding the chase and cutting to it

I was asked this on Christmas day, much to my amusement. Since 1996 I haven’t used any kind of editor outside of a classroom (you know, where the tutors are insisting you don’t use notepad (actually I prefer Vi as the text editor of my choice and have ported this to most of my computers)).
Back in 1996, I took a course in Virtual Environments and Multimedia at the University of Hull as part of my degree course and at the time Netscape came with a WYSIWYG editor and I did use it, I carried my website around on a floppy so at any computer connected to the internet, I had my links.
But learning about the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C to you and me) and the standardisation of HTML made me look at how Netscape was rendering my HTML.
It was a mess, not as bad as some but I stripped out all the Netscape’isms. It was all done in notepad on a PC and Final Writer on an Amiga: Final Writer had an AREXX port that would verify my links and also render the pages to test.
I had a style I was using but these were defined in the forerunner of cascading style sheets and were easy to find and replace when I wanted to change the look and feel. By the end of 1996, my website fitted on a single floppy including 30 images.
All well and good, but the grounding in HTML meant that when new things came along, I could easily incorporate them. I took CSS (cascading style sheets) under my wing in 1999 and was writing code that could dynamically create webpages back in 1998. (CSS meant this was really easily achieved, a single style sheet for an subsite) and by 1998 my pages did not sit on a single floppy. I even did a javadoc style interface for Oracle Web Server interfaces – 80 functions presented in HTML and used by around 500 people within the company paying for my time.
I had also started to do this at work: data driven quotation tools using Oracle web server, even a data driven style sheet meant that a website generating 1300 page combinations could be restyled in less than five minutes.
innerTube when it came along in 2008 had a similar basis. A library of code driven from a data base. More importantly, moving that to HTML 5 took 30 minutes while testing on the top five browsers to do all 7 sub-sections of my home web site and less than that for the ones I run at work.
There are still differences between them, and there are many more out there than Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari as tracked by the W3C. I usually like to get users to test pages rather than checking it myself (user acceptance testing at the same time) but if I am seriously trying something new, I use http://browsershots.org/.
Very occasionally I do forget the pain and try to use Front Page or Dreamweaver and they do what they set out to do, create very standard pages quickly and easily – but the post processing necessary to get them to do anything like managing anything about 5 pages is always the let down – who has time for that?
Have you considered using WordPress?