I can’t say that coding HTML and CSS is something I do for fun, but I find it sort of relaxing in the same way I find solving crossword puzzles relaxing. I also regard them as part of the tools needed in the creative process and not just the implementation. I’ll typically start out a web design directly in HTML and paint it from there with CSS in whatever CMS framework I happen to be working in.
I know this takes me just a bit out of the mainstream, but when I began designing websites back in 1993 or 94, the only browser available was Mosaic, and the only way to build a website was to learn how to code it by hand. Of course, there was no CSS at the time and HTML was much simpler than it is today. I suppose I had the luxury of learning it slowly over time as the whole thing increased in complexity. If I were learning it from scratch today, I might have another opinion of it all.
I’ve never learned any SQL, though, but I’ve pretty much mastered RegEx and .htaccess directives — making me even more of an oddball. I still struggle with JavaScript, and never did get the hang of ActionScripting when Flash was still a big deal. As for PHP, I’m mostly lost, but I know just enough to fake my way through a reasonable conversation with a programmer who does.
All things considered, though, I still prefer working with print a lot more.
I avoided web programing for most of the 1990s, but dabbled in WYSIWYG editors and Flash. In the early 2000s I learned HTML, FileMaker scripting, and a little bit of Flash ActionScript. But that was as far as I wanted to go before I started looking for designated programers to relieve me from the technical. I eventually learned just enough of CSS and Javascript to enhance a few of the freelance websites I built, but not enough to make a career out of it. I can feel the creative muscles atrophy the more time I spend coding and troubleshooting bugs. I just don’t have the patience for it, especially not in a creative frame of mind.
Coding just feels too clunky and time-consuming of a way to make a page layout. Learning front-end coding languages that should be automated with a WYSIWYG editor feels like learning how to build your own car in order to drive. If the WYSIWYG editors create messy code, the software developers like Adobe and Macromedia should have done a better job of making WYSIWYG editors produce cleaner code. I remember the days of the early 1990s when we used to get PostScript errors on print jobs before PDF was a thing. Print layout programs like PageMaker and Quark were WYSIWYG editors of PostScript in effect. And yet nobody expected graphic designers to learn the PostScript language then. Eventually they fixed the problems with print page editors, but not the web page editors.
I understand why people want to learn code. It can even be fun sometimes. At some point in the future, coding jobs will probably be the only paying jobs left. But even those jobs will eventually give way to automation. Applying creativity is much more fun. My fantasy world consist of software that will give you whatever you think of with a brain-computer interface, and no technical skills required.