I’m as skeptical of WYSIWYG as the next person, and I use NotePad and HomeSite for much of my HTML editing. However, sometimes I want to see, more or less, wha t I might get. I’ve been using Dreamweaver 4.0 for a couple of years, but clearly there are better options out there. After all, the copyright date on this version of Dreamweaver is 1997-2000, so hopefully things have improved in the last four years.
So, what’s your WYSIWYG HTML editing software of choice? Why do you like it?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
FrontPage 2003. Now don’t start laughing. Most people who ridicule FP really don’t understand the program, what it can do, or just take as gospel anything bad they hear about the program (it’s so customizable you can prevent it from generating a single webbot or FP-specific tag, essentially turning it into Notepad++). And since you like to get your hands dirty in the code, FP2003’s code options are excellent (Microsoft did, after all, invent Intellisense technology). FP2003’s publishing features and site management are also second to none.
Give it a try.
– Dennis DeRobertis
PS I don’t work for Microsoft. I just happen to have dedicated many years developing add-in technology for the Office suite, in particular, FrontPage. If you have any questions about FP, please, drop me a line.
For windows you can’t go wrong with Coffecup HTML,
as basic as you need, it’s pretty much notepad with a preview,
For Linux I’ve been trying to find my way around bluefish….still not sure on that one.
Seriously? Stick with HomeSite. My experience has been that I work faster and more efficiently in code than I do futzing around with a WYSIWYG editor.
If you’re still stuck on WYSIWYG, go with Dreamweaver MX. They’re still the closest to outputting valid HTML & CSS.
Dreamweaver 4.0
Sometimes the design starts off in fireworks.
Never bothered learning html but find myself digging around in the code a lot more often lately.
TextPad. UltraEdit.
Oh wait, you said WYSIWYG?
Homesite. It has a WYSIWYG mode, doesn’t it? 🙂
I’m old school — when I started writing HTML, the closest thing there was to a WYSIWYG editor was PageMill. People would advertise having PageMill free sites. It was bad.
FrontPage isn’t completely terrible, but has far too many quirks. Too many of my customers use it and it *does* muck with your code. So if you spend hours creating the perfect table by hand, do *not* open it in FrontPage. And more importantly, don’t use it with any content management system — it’ll overwrite damn near everything necessary. Placeholders? We don’t need no stinking placeholders.
It’s possible to use, but you have to be entirely too careful. Dreamweaver does a better job of not fucking with the stuff that you’ve done yourself.
But all in all… I’ll stick with my text editors. 🙂
I’ve just downloaded and started using Dreamweaver MX 2004. I used Dreamweaver 3 for quite a while, and I’ve been impressed with the features added in MX. I like the split design/code editor. I like how well it integrates page editing with an external .css file. There’s still some weirdness here and there, but I attribute that to my not knowing all the latest HTML tricks.
I really appreciate the Extensions feature – everytime I look on the website I find other extensions that would be really handy if I was doing HTML a lot.
Granted, I didn’t PAY for MX 2004 (yet), but if I were in the business of creating things in HTML, I sure would.
I use vi (www.vim.org) mainly. You can get any more WYS than plain, hardcore text. Wanna see what you’re getting? Hit F5 in your browser.
Dreamweaver? Bah. FrontPage? *snort* Resistance is futile. Learn the code before you learn the GUI.
Well, this will tick the code-heads off, but NetObjects Fusion – I’ve used it since v2. I was an old DTP guy and got into the web about 10+ years ago – but I hated coding. I used a bunch of different apps, but ick. I stumbled across Fusion about six versions ago, in or around 96-97 ish I think. No, the code isn’t clean, but I don’t care. I can whip a site together using my own look quickly and efficiently. Oh, the code may be a hair bigger, but again, who cares, and the only folks that look at code … well, have nothing better to do.
Kinda like using old WordPerfect 5.1 text commands or using Word now … hmmm … what’s more efficient.
My .02 cents.
Cheers,
David
“Oh, the code may be a hair bigger, but again, who cares”
If your audience is on a LAN or cable modem/DSL, that’s just fine, and these days it is a pretty safe assumption.
However, there are a lot of people out there who are still on dialup. A few Kbytes here and a few Kbytes there and pretty soon it adds up.
I run in to this all the time, trying to explain to people why a 1600×1200 24bpp .BMP file is NOT a good thing to have in a webpage.
There are times when a slick GUI is the way to go, there are times when a text interface is the best. All depends on the situation, the person and what they want.
An interesting article…
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6282
Shudder, WYSIWYG.
An editor I used a few years ago and was easily the best at its job at the time was 1st Page 2000 from Evrsoft (http://www.evrsoft.com/). Their site reports that 1st Page 2004 is nearly ready. Another plus for this tool is that it’s free. The preview tab uses internet explorer’s rendering engine.
I use Emacs for editing HTML. It has a pretty good pretty printing mode and understands basic tag structure. If you really want fancy check out XEmacs with does some fairly decent templating and understands nested tag structure.
When I don’t care about the internal structure I use FrontPage (e.g. editing other peoples HTML).
i would stick with homesite, and dreamweaver for the few thing you may need a wisywig for.
i use frontpage quite regularly at work for a certain gov project that requires it. and in my opinion, it’s garbage, it’s just as buggy as any other microsoft product and also likes to make decisions for you.
that said i’m not using 2003, i hear it is much better. but for my money, stay away from anything that adds code without you asking it too.
I’m of the old school, nigh onto 10 years of pounding out HTML with vi(m). The time spent learning how to use vi in the 80s has been repaid many times over, and vim has been icing on the cake.
That’s context. Over those years, I looked at WYSIWYG tools from time to time, never found them worth the time of day.
Recently, I was persuaded to try Dreamweaver4 for a for-hire project (with the concept that someone relatively unskilled would later maintain content w/DW). It failed CSS-101 pretty horribly. We upped the ante to Dreamweaver MX and it handled the CSS part fine, offered some benefits, and a lot of overhead. I’m still looking for the big productivity boost a mature tool should offer, but at least it doesn’t produce damaged code.
In Windows I use HTML Kit (rox!). In Linux, Quanta.
Re: the 1600 x 1200 BMP response to my NetObjects Fusion option … of course, if you put a big file on a website like that it’s going to kill people on dial up. But I didn’t mention that, I was talking about an extra k or two on a page. That isn’t a big deal. Dial up or not. I was stuck in a rural area for 10 years on a 26.4k dial up connection and ran a web business. So, if I could tolerate a site loading at that, for most other people it would be fine.
Seems we are missing Darren’s question – he was asking about WYSIWYG editors. Fusion is one of those, but not an editor, but a generator. You aren’t required to use the built in styles, and with some tricks can make the code small. No, it isn’t pure, but this only matters to code heads. And most of the time, these folks aren’t the target market of my clients. I’ve got all the respect in the world for folks that can bang a site out in notepad, but that isn’t efficient. It’s like saying manual page paste-up is more efficient that using a DTP program.
This hand-code vs. wysiwyg is such a lame argument these days. There is no winning, but as I mentioned earlier, why code if you don’t have to.
Cheers,
David
Dreamweaver MX because it is much more than simply a wysiwyg editor. The site synchronization/check-in,check-out feature allows multiple developers to work on a project without version control problems. MX 2004 has an integrated CSS editor that’s similar to TopStyle. The ability to clean up MS Word’s horrible HTML with a single command is very useful. And, for the hardcore coders, it’s an easy switch from wysiwyg to code view.
For static websites: Net objects Fusion 7 is what I use. I love to code but If the customer wants a good look and feel to the site and requires it in a hurry NOF does the job.
Working on a team effort I go for Adobe’s Go Live.
I suppose dreamweaver fits in here. Don’t like the thing myself but fellow workers give it the thumbs up.
If you need something really fast that your customer can contribute to and update themselves then as long as you have .net and SQL DotNetNuke is supurb for portals and intranets (plenty of scope for the code heads here).
Phil :0)