Dreamweaver Code vs. Handwritten Code

Most of the code generated by Dreamweaver is similar to what I would write by hand. The first thing I do not normally use is meta tags. Things that I do not normally use include meta tags which are inserted automatically. The documnet source, at least the one I created, was well-formed (no ill-nested structures). All tags had corresponding end tags, except for the <meta> tag.

I am not quite sure why Dreamweaver replaced the ~ character by the code %7E. When I edited the code and replaced the three character code by the character ~. The page loaded just fine in IExploer 5.0. Unless different browsers interpret the ~ character differently, I cannot see why would I use a three-letter code to represent one character that can be displayed directly.

Another interesting point is that if I format a white space to be bold of size +1, for example. Dreamweaver inserts extra tags for the font and bold settings for the white space. I sort of expected it to be smart enough to gid rid of those tags in the case of white space, since removing does not affect the document presentation. Example code follows.

<b>Mohamed ElBendary,<font size="+1"> </font></b>