Made With Notepad Campaign: The "Made With Notepad" Story

Made With Notepad Campaign

The "Made With Notepad" story

When I affix the "Made With Notepad" button to my page, it adds a certain level of pride. The button means that someone actually took the time to learn HTML (and/or Javascript, PHP, etc.), rather than use a cheap web page making program (i.e. "web page editor"). People who really know what they're doing stay away from those -- they use instead a text-editor such as Notepad.

Why, you might ask? Quite simply, coding done "by hand" turns out a better page. Editors often don't do all kinds of neat stuff, assuming that you want a plain, boring, static page. Furthermore, editors produce sloppy and cumbersome code, resulting in less-compatible, slower loading pages. DMOZ's Open Directory Project has a saying which sums it up pretty well: Humans do it better.

For example, AOL Press, America Off-Line's web page editor, doesn't support the EMBED tag (for audio & multimedia files), barely supports any Javascript, and it puts a little "Created with AOL Press 2.0" remark in every HTML file it touches, as if the program was actually proud of it's own handiwork!

Microsuck's "Frontpage" is even worse, as it creates the most bloated HTML files I've ever seen. I once took an 88k HTML file that somebody had made in Frontpage, and (no kidding) shrunk it to 26k without changing the page's appearance in a browser whatsoever. I was amazed!

With a text-editor like Notepad you don't have any of these problems. You can do whatever you want, all day long. Quick & simple. So when someone affixes the "Made with Notepad" logo to their page, it stands for something. Not to mention a little boost to my ego...