You’ll notice a trend in the responses so far – WYSIWYGS are rubbish.
What’s missing is WHY they are rubbish, so lets cover that.
The very notion of WYSIWYG runs contrary to the POINT of using HTML in the first place. The ability to write device neutral content which the user agent can best determine how to show to the user; to which we can add CSS to target specific device capabilities. With the plethora of screen sizes, resolutions, different rendering engines, available fonts, device capabilities – much less not everyone is even going to be accessing pages using a ‘screen’ – what you see is most always NEVER what the end user is going to get!
That’s the POINT of HTML, to be able to markup your content in a manner EVERYONE can get to it regardless of what they are trying to get to it WITH. Designing just for screen at a specific size, font-size and resolution is a giant steaming pile of /FAIL/ – which is why most every WYSIWYG ‘website editor’ is complete and utter garbage.
It’s also why good coders practice separation of presentation from content. HTML is to say what the content IS… a header, a paragraph, a list… It is then up to the user agent to best determine how to show a header, paragraph or list… or for the developer to customize it to specific target devices using CSS.
By definition WYSIWYGS tend to use presentational markup – either by deprecated tags and attributes like CENTER, FONT and ALIGN, or by using presentational class names like “Left” or “BigFont”. This defeats the point of even using CSS in the first place. Typing along in a WYSIWYG a user might select a section of text and make it bigger, without ever asking “WHY am I making it bigger, WHAT is this element I’m making bigger?” – the key to semantic markup that can improve accessibility and search results.
The real kicker of the whole thing is many people end up relying on the various ‘tools’ without ever learning to do the job properly. As Stevie D said, that’s fine for sleazing out some personal home page any old way, but if you are working on a for profit company home page you need to raise the bar beyond the capabilities of most “web page editors”… you need semantic markup for accessibility, you need semantic markup to help with your SEO… separation of presentation from content simplifies long term maintenance, eases site redesigns in the future AND leverages caching models to reduce bandwidth consumption lowering hosting costs. These are all things a business site needs to think about that using the WYSIWYG portions of web editors CANNOT DELIVER – and by the time you know enough HTML/CSS to not use the WYSIWYG parts of fat bloated overpriced train-wrecks like Dreamweaver, you don’t need anything more than a normal programmers text editor of which there are several dozen available for free!
As a friend who passed the veil about a year ago used to say, “the only thing about Dreamweaver that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting it’s use.”
Personally I extend that to the entire suite of Adobe products as well as most of the other WYSIWYG editors and ‘programming aids’ out there. They all amount to little more than crutches for the incompetent at best, and sleazeball shortcuts that will screw over whoever the site is actually for at worst!
Finally, the most important thing about a solid command of HTML and CSS is you can then do the job REGARDLESS of what tools an employer ‘expects’ you to use – including anything that might come up in the future.
If you are teaching a class to do this, then you should be preparing them to be able to WORK in the field – so drive home concepts like quality work and a work ethic – two things sleazing out a page using a ‘web editor’ like Dreamweaver or “The artist formerly known as Frontpage” have absolutely nothing to do with.
Also, if you are going to teach HTML, use a MODERN RECOMMENDED doctype like HTML 4.01 STRICT or XHTML 1.0 STRICT. Explain that ‘draft’ means “don’t use it for production work”, that just because something is ‘newer’ doesn’t mean it’s better and can quite often mean “not ready for prime-time” – and do NOT teach them presentational markup except for that it is an outdated and unprofessional way of doing things that no self respecting professional would use. That means they have NO business using FONT, CENTER, ALIGN, VALIGN, BORDER, TARGET or any of the other HTML tags and attributes deprecated in STRICT.
Do us all a favor, and teach them MODERN coding, instead of doing what it seems most College level teachers do and shove their students heads firmly up 1998’s backside.