Why Visio wireframes are outmoded (Was [Sigia-l] NYU IA classdescription link)

[Johnson, Bryce]

From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org on behalf of Anders Ramsay
Sent: Sun 7/10/2005 1:35 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Why Visio wireframes are outmoded (Was [Sigia-l] NYU IA classdescription link)

"Are there good tools for building wireframes in XHTML and CSS?  There
is one decent tool, Dreamweaver, but one still needs to be smarter
than the tool and understand what it should be doing not what it does.
 Every version of Dreamweaver gets much better.
 
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I have been trying for a while to build a toolkit using Dreamweaver to create prototypes using webstandards development. The problem is that it is difficult to use a WYSIWYG environment to create semantically structured content and I have decided that I feel a pattern library like the one presented by Erin Malone, Matt Leacock, Chanel Wheeler at this years summit may be the way to go. I also think that certain situation or work environments would benefit from the opportunity to have an extra interation to refactor interface code. I know for me I have more coders  on my team then wireframers and if I run past project numbers I think I might actually save time when i start with HTML.
 
However, I completely agree with Donna when she says that it depends on the situation. Participatory Design for instance, faster in Visio (In fact I would argue that my team is faster in Visio then paper prototyping techniques but that is another discussion.)
 
Bryce