Ask Slashdot: Web Site Editing Software For the Long Haul?

MouseR writes "It seems we can't rely on software, in particular Web site editing software, to exist for the long haul. Every time I rely on something, it takes only a couple of years before it gets trashed. I have used GoLive's CyberStudio before it got engulfed as GoLive from Adobe. Both got trashed. I eventually used Apple's .Mac HomePage. It got trashed and replaced with iWeb. I then used iWeb, hosted on MobileMe, and Apple just killed it again, along with the hosting. So, as I'm preparing to move my stuff on various web sites, onto my own hosting server (outsourced), I'm wondering what kind of visual web site editor(s) I could use, for the long haul. I'm rather sick of changing tools every other year and as a software developer, would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Notepad

[cgeys]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

Re:Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but vim is!

Re:Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, Notepad++ is.

Re:Notepad

[JewFish]

Vim on the other hand is an excellent replacement for any website development IDE.

Re:Notepad

[betterunixthanunix]

ed is an excellent replacement for vim for any purpose.

Re:notepad

[Dracos]

Notepad did change. They upped the file size limit beyond 64k at some point, right?

Re:Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

Just type

cat > index.html

and get to work. Mistakes can be retroactively fixed with SED, and you can provide basic search functionality with a nice .sh using GREP.

Happy hacking!

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

Notepad is not only a useless HTML editor, it's a useless text editor. Use a real one and you'll see the virtue of this argument.

EMACS or vi on a decent Unix/linux workstation is your IDE. I challenge any web developer to keep up with me in site design and updating. You might be able to stay with me on a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates, but I guarantee you that as soon as you start working on anything non-trivial (like the 100,000+ static documents I currently administer), a real text editor and the basic set of *nix utilities will leave any IDE looking weak and impoverished.

Re:Notepad

[jellomizer]

For Web Development a good IDE is actually quite useless. Unless you want your website to look obviously from your IDE your better off using standard text editors. I have had some forced time in an IDE where I needed it to make HTML, I had to spend twice as much time working around it to get stuff done.
That said, a modern IDE is nice in terms that if you don't try to build your html visually, they often have JavaScript or the server side language development debugging. Notepad++ VIM or Emacs with the appropriate modules installed can work quite efficiently

Re:Notepad

[Fjandr]

This.

Vim is an incredibly useful tool, but does not replace other tools for producing websites with even an insignificant amount of complexity.

Re:Notepad

[realityimpaired]

Even good coders have off days. I used to prefer writing all the code/scripts in Notepad, but switched to Geany because of the automatic syntax checking and formatting. It's not that I'm not capable of doing it right myself, it's because it makes it easier to find typos.

As for my answer to the OP's question, if he's got database access, he's best off installing a CMS of his choice, and using that to do his website. It'll make updates easier, and he won't have to worry about his program of choice going the way of the dodo, because he can always keep it installed on his system.

Re:Notepad

[WrongSizeGlass]

Since he seems to be using a Mac I think BBEdit is a decent choice. I don't think Notepad++ runs on Macs ;-)

Re:Notepad

[haruchai]

It just might - http://macpp.sourceforge.net/
Haven't tried it myself as I rarely have the opportunity to use a Mac

Re:Notepad

[haruchai]

Oh, never mind; the project hasn't managed to create any code in a year and a half.

Re:Notepad

[Anonymous Coward]

For the combination of long haul and visual editing, I would look into Eclipse.
There are a number of WYSIWYG editors for web editing.

Or, if you're feeling really daring... you can always write you own.
Maybe that's outside the scope of the question, but that's what I would do if I felt the way the TP does.

Thing is, tools change.

It's just the way it goes. Even something like Dreamweaver has changed ten times in the last decade. Dramatically, in some cases. The code you get out of it today looks nothing like the code you would have gotten out of earlier versions of the program. That's just the way it goes in the commercial tool space.

I've given up on visual editing, myself.
I use Netbeans and buy what I need from Themeforest for the front end. I know it sounds cynical (and designers will disagree with me), but there's really no need anymore for totally custom websites every time. Nobody is going to remember your domain name, your brand, your identity, or you... unless you're spending a billion dollars on marketing or you become the next viral craze. I would venture to guess that neither is true about any of your projects.

That's reality. Deal with it.

The best you can hope for is to score well enough in search results that some people will find you some of the time, and that your site is built well enough to bring in what you want it to. There are over three trillion websites on the internet now, so that's not as easy as it used to be, either. In order to be seen at all, you need quality code, good fast servers, a viable product, and some original content.

In that context, the tools don't really matter all that much.

Just my two cents.
Since I mentioned theme forest, I'm going to make this anonymous, so I don't see the backlash.

I suck.

Re:Notepad

[mabhatter654]

Ultimately though, if your tool doesn't play nice with the lowly Notepad, then you're at the mercy of being tied to shifting winds of business.

If you are doing this professionally, spring for Dreamweaver which fits the bill of being long term, and generating output readable via notepad if you need to work with hand-coders.

Generally, if you've been designing "web pages" this long and don't want to edit by hand, you really should consider learning that skill, or be tied to what tools let you do.

Re:Notepad

[mabhatter654]

Textmate is what you're looking for as the "bar" for Mac text editors.

Re:Notepad

[vk2sky]

...and you try and tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you!

Re:Notepad

[Requiem18th]

Well, *that*.

Re:Notepad

[twebb72]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

but I guarantee you that as soon as you start working on anything non-trivial (like the 100,000+ static documents I currently administer), a real text editor and the basic set of *nix utilities will leave any IDE looking weak and impoverished.

What a huge waste of time for a developer to be maintaining 100,000+ static documents, by him(her)self. You can be fast, but sounds like your job is ripe to be replaced by a part time DBA and a bunch of underpaid content editors.

Re:Notepad

[OakDragon]

This.

Re:Notepad

[milimetric]

It may be that I can write some of that fancy new server side code to generate those 100,000+ files, then cache them to get the same performance. ;)

Re:Notepad

[cslax]

Seconded, TextMate is amazing, and if you learn all its KB shortcuts, it can be very efficient. At that point you really might as well learn emacs/vi but that's neither here nor there.

Re:Notepad

[NateTech]

Jokes are supposed to be funny.

Re:Notepad

[e4g4]

TextMate is close enough on the very basics that I always get annoyed when I try to "control excess". It doesn't do two stroke shortcuts, and so I always end up with a search box.

Re:Notepad

[Fjandr]

I quite agree, it would have been perfectly fine. It is also perfectly fine as-is, being a relatively recent form of colloquial agreement as noted by the Anonymous Coward a bit earlier.

I use relatively few of them; this one I happen to like, and use it where I feel it is contextually appropriate.

Re:Notepad

[slashmydots]

But notepad hasn't changed in like 15 years lol. In fact, it really hasn't changed since literal notepads centuries ago. Though Thomas Jefferson wasn't known for using them to write HTML.
But seriously, all drag and drop design suites in the world generate garbage code. Everything should be done by hand coding if you want your website to actually look right and work correctly. Trying to resize and arrange things in an IDE is just as slow as typing it precisely the first time by hand. But the annoyances like syncronization management, link management, repetetive or tedious tasks, CSS realtime context popups as you type, and possibly realtime accurate previewing should be handled by a program. I'd say find the simplest program to do it and stick with it basically forever. We're stuck with Golive CS1 at my work and I'm used to Dreamweaver CS3 but who cares? I don't care if Golive defaults to font tags, old bold tags, and paragraph tags and doesn't know what half the CSS properties are, I'm typing them in myself by hand. Honestly, CS2 doesn't have any licensing hangups and CS3 isn't much worse so I'd just get dreamweaver and sit on it for a decade. The autocad designers still use photoshop elements 3 without major issues and 9 is out now. Just because a new version came out doesn't mean you need to stop using your old one so unless they force you (which Adobe is famous for not doing) then you're good to go with what you got. Coincidentally we did just order some copies of Photoshop Elements 9 just today but still :-P

Re:Notepad

[Chas]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

No. Notepad isn't a replacement for an IDE (of whatever caliber). It is CLEARLY superior.

Most IDEs (and all the PhotoChoppers out there) with their top-down development do nothing but produce reams of hackish code bloat that doesn't work well cross-platform or in terms of accessibility. Worse, these sites consume many many times the bandwidth, load dogshit slow, and tend to look like crap on anything other than the dev's machine.

It's a shitty excuse for NOT knowing how to code the site from scratch (or at least a basic template).

It's a shitty excuse for having zero compliance with accessibility guidelines and using eye-blinding color pallettes and microscopic font sizes and typefaces CLEARLY unsuitable for web presentation.

It's a shitty excuse for having a layout take up a narrow sliver of the entire page canvas (or side-scroll "infinitely" as if everyone had a 2048x1535 monitor like the foofy, brain-dead webmaster).

It's a shitty excuse for having 3 megabytes of markup and images to display 10K in text.

Yes, learning how to do it CORRECTLY takes a bit more time UP FRONT. But it saves effort down the road as your code is portable, maintainable, and can be rapidly and cleanly altered and appended without massive surgery and metric ass-tons of further prototyping.

Re:Notepad

[Dadoo]

I'm new to HTML, so I'd like to ask an honest question, even if it's a little off-topic: if you're writing your pages in straight HTML, how do you separate your style from your content? If, for example, I wanted to add a menu to the left-hand side of all my pages, the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.

Re:Notepad

[Chas]

So? You give the coder the basic "back of the napkin" drawing for the layout. He codes it and supplies basic artwork as filler.

You then hand off the basic layout artwork and coordination to someone better at working the images.

Clean code + pretty graphics = WIN. And then you don't have to dick with all the hackery that goes into various IDEs and PhotoChop sites.

Basic design --> Code --> Finished artwork.

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

It may be that I can write some of that fancy new server side code to generate those 100,000+ files, then cache them to get the same performance. ;)

I doubt it, actually. I won't bore you with the detailed rationale for using static files, but you can trust me when I say it's compelling. One particular reason is that these documents are all deeply cross-referenced and the citations need to be managed very carefully. As the number of documents grows, the potential number of links in all other documents grows exponentially. The only way to be sure that all the references are complete, up to date and correct is to reprocess the entire collection periodically.

There's much more to it than this, but rest assured, every single person who has dealt with this system has looked at server-side, on-demand generation and decided against it.

... But yes, we do have a proper build system in place, consisting of a tool chain of simple, powerful utilities bound together with a bunch of scripted glue code. all maintained in EMACS and/or VI on Linux machines - which was my original point. 8^)

Re:Notepad

[gdshaw]

I'm new to HTML, so I'd like to ask an honest question, even if it's a little off-topic: if you're writing your pages in straight HTML, how do you separate your style from your content? If, for example, I wanted to add a menu to the left-hand side of all my pages, the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.

I think you will find that most of the people who maintain a site of any size with a text editor are not writing straight HTML. Personally I use a combination of XSLT and CSS, which allows almost complete separation of style from content.

Re:Notepad

[Gordonjcp]

the only way I know to do it now is to to re-edit every single one of those 100,000+ pages.

This is why you don't write your pages in straight HTML ;-)

That doesn't answer your question, though. So let's go through some possible ways of doing it.

The first, most obvious way is to edit a menu into every single page in the same place. You can do the same with the headers and footers too. That's a lot of copy-and-paste, though. Some editors will let you expand out a macro, so in your static text you'd put some suitably flagged thing like **MENU** that won't appear in real text. You then cook up the pages from tagged body text and upload them. This works, but is tedious. If you change one thing in a common block of text, then you have to recreate and upload the entire site every time. This is how Actinic E-Commerce used to work, I don't know if it still does. It sucks.

Okay, so how about some means of including the menu from a single file? Back in the day, we used to use Server-Side Includes. Rename your page to my_beachball_collection.shtml and stick a line like

<-- #include virtual="menu.html" -->

to insert the menu. This doesn't always work, especially if SSI isn't enabled. There's an excellent chance your host has PHP though, so instead you do this:

<?php require "menu.html"; ?>

Great! But before long you work out that actually it might be easier to just write the body text and have an index.php file that reads it in with a line like

<?php require $QUERY['page']; ?>

and a URL like http://mysite.me/index.php?page=my_beachball_collection - and this works perfectly. Until someone feeds it http://mysite.me/index.php?page=../../../etc/shadow and of course because your misconfigured server is running as root, it serves up your shadow password file.

Or, you could put the pages into a database, and then use a query like

printf("SELECT title, body FROM pages WHERE page='%s';", $QUERY['page']);

. Then you have URLs like the ones before, but you don't let people read files, you feed the content from a database. This works, except you're Sony so someone feeds it http://mysite.me/index.php?page='; UPDATE PAGES SET body="0wned"; and wipes out all your content since you didn't sanitise the database strings, or set up sane database permissions.

At which point, you give up and just install Drupal.

Re:Notepad

[dotancohen]

Notepad is not only a useless HTML editor, it's a useless text editor. Use a real one and you'll see the virtue of this argument.

EMACS or vi on a decent Unix/linux workstation is your IDE. I challenge any web developer to keep up with me in site design and updating. You might be able to stay with me on a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates, but I guarantee you that as soon as you start working on anything non-trivial (like the 100,000+ static documents I currently administer), a real text editor and the basic set of *nix utilities will leave any IDE looking weak and impoverished.

Nice EMACS plug, but it's not what the OP wants. The OP is maintaining "a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates".

Re:Notepad

[Gaygirlie]

Before someone comes in putting down all the IDE's and tools for web designing and suggests Notepad, let me just say this - no, notepad is not replacement for a good, solid IDE.

I personally use 'nano' as my primary programming tool :)

Re:Notepad

[hankwang]

I'm a long-time emacs user, but I'm not too enthusiastic about emacs's support for html syntax. I haven't found a convenient way to deal with mixed html, javascript, php, and css, each with different indentation and syntax highlighting requirements. How do you deal with those?

Re:Notepad

[narcc]

If his host runs apache, a slightly more involved index.php and some .htaccess magic and he can avoid the ugly urls.

Er, just google "Pretty URLs"

At which point, you give up and just install Drupal.

Yeah, the guy who Asked Slashdot should probably just do this too.

Re:Notepad

[DarwinSurvivor]

Neither would I. They could potentially become WAY to powerful!

Re:Notepad

[Shikaku]

find ~/website/. | sed -i 's/\&copy;2010/\&copy;2011/

Where find ~/website. | wc -l
returns 48109 files.

Please get back to me when you can do that by hand, thanks~

Re:Notepad

[Hognoxious]

As the number of documents grows, the potential number of links in all other documents grows exponentially

No it doesn't.

Re:Notepad

[ianare]

Why would you have that on each page ?!? Why not use a footer ?

In my experience, anytime you have copy/paste, you are asking for trouble. Much better to use a modular architecture.

Re:Notepad

[cyclomedia]

I wrote my own web server, a bastardised (i.e. vastly improved) bootstrapping of ASP.Net. It has what I call Fragments, so you'd just do

<Chan:Fragment runat="server" source="SideMenu" />

Which is equivalent to the PHP mentioned elsewhere:

<?php require "menu.html"; ?>

Except that Fragments can have forms, logic and server side code in them (e.g. a login form that swaps itself with the currently logged in user's details ). Am currently in the midst of allowing fragments to postback and update themselves in-situ using AJAX, but I'm lazy

Re:Notepad

[AmiMoJo]

Edit footer.php -> done.

Re:Notepad

[AmiMoJo]

A good IDE is supposed to let you hand-code the template and then make the task of adding actual content WYSIWYG. Ideally non-technical people should be able to use it and even for us pros it should save manually adding tags and checking the results.

At the last place I worked we did that for a customer by hand coding the template in HTML and CSS and then letting them use KompoZer to add their own content. We tried Wordpress before that but the editor is shockingly bad and the customer rejected it.

Re:Notepad

[monkeythug]

Biggest problem with sourceforge and has been for ages.

You'll do a search and find a project description that makes you go "Wow! That's exactly what I'm looking for!", then you get the disappointment a few seconds later of realising that writing the description is actually the entirety of the effort ever expended on the project.

Sourceforge really need to purge all these vapourware projects.

Re:Notepad

[ynohoo]

Web-designers will throw their hand up in horror, but good old HTML2 frames still work just fine, just be careful about escaping the frame when linking out of the site. See sig for example. HTML2 is also readable by mere mortals, a feature which later versions have endevoured to remove.

Re:Notepad

[jawtheshark]

I always wonder why the current year is simply not displayed. I mean, that's not hard and never involves any editing ever again.

Re:Notepad

[AC-x]

And what happens when you trash the copyright attribution on a photo from 2010?

Re:Notepad

[goarilla]

find ~/website/. | sed -i 's/\©2010/\©2011/

That doesn't work !

Re:Notepad

[paiute]

Well, *that*.

And the udder ting.

Re:Notepad

[realityimpaired]

You use an editor that's actually designed to handle those, like Geany. It handles inline code quite nicely, and is cross-platform.

Re:Notepad

[hvm2hvm]

Or you can filter your search by the project activity or something like that.

Re:Notepad

[Dog-Cow]

You have anywhere from 10's to 100's of thousands of relationships between documents, and you somehow think a good RDBMS wouldn't be of help? You may be an amazing site admin, but you're not much of a developer.

Re:Notepad

[hvm2hvm]

If you have 48000 instances of duplicate content you are really doing it wrong and should not be responsible with that stuff.

Re:Notepad

[mick_S3]

This is one of the most unintentionally funny posts I have ever seen! CONGRATS!

Re:Notepad

[TheChicGeek]

Amen

Re:Notepad

[TheChicGeek]

::You might want to work on those comprehension skills there, buddy.:: It also had nothing to do with coders vs designers, Mr. Kettle

Re:Notepad

[Kagetsuki]

YES! Precisely what I though. Hell if you have SSH/Shell access to the server you're hosting on just throw up a screen/byobu session and open VIM in it and edit right there. There's even a ton of extensions/plug-ins for web development. Not to mention VIM has lots of pretty color schemes for syntax highlighting and looks great in a transparent terminal!

If you absolutely need graphical interaction there's GVIM and other variants as well.

Re:Notepad

[MrAngryForNoReason]

Or more to the point why not just use something like:

&copy; <?php echo date('Y') ?>

Then if you are in a high load situation where you don't want the overhead of dynamic pages just cache the output. Doing a search and replace across 10,000 files sounds like a recipe for fail.

Re:Notepad

[CptNerd]

If that's the "bar" what's the "foo?"

Re:Notepad

[mabhatter654]

The foo is who we pity. Cause he got no Fu.

Re:Notepad

[angel'o'sphere]

I don't want to desillusion you, however there are plenty of IDEs and also simple text editors that can do that as well. Some even let you preview and later undo such a change ...

Re:Notepad

[angel'o'sphere]

No. Notepad isn't a replacement for an IDE (of whatever caliber). It is CLEARLY superior.

Erm, an editor where you can not "configure" the line ending? Rofl.

All your other points make no sense either. What do web standards or using the wrong fonts to do with the tool you use? Do you really belive that the same idiot, who can not use an IDE correctly, learns "design" by using a text input tool (no notepad is not even an editor)???

Re:Notepad

[xouumalperxe]

You might be able to stay with me on a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates, but I guarantee you that as soon as you start working on anything non-trivial (like the 100,000+ static documents I currently administer), a real text editor and the basic set of *nix utilities will leave any IDE looking weak and impoverished.

What, then, does your world view make of my day-to-day pattern of using Vim for most html/css/js, netbeans for all my java, and the command line to tie it all together?

Re:Notepad

[lthorne]

Back when I worked for a local ISP in the mid 90's, I required my employees to learn to hand code HTML using notepad. I still require this for new hires now that I own my own company here in NYC. You can put every wysiwyg editor on your resume, but the job testing portion is still hand coding in notepad. In short, learn HTML and you won't need to rely on any specific editor.

Re:Notepad

[rgviza]

There's no such thing as a "good, solid IDE".

Re:Notepad

[FictionPimp]

textwrangler, textmate (one of my favorites) or for more of a "ide" coda.

I tend to use textmate and cyberduck when doing web work. Most of our stuff is all drupal now so I don't get to write much code anymore.

Re:Notepad

[FictionPimp]

Does it matter if the code is secure? Does it matter if you can fix it if dreamweaver destroys your project?

I partner with a great designer with awesome css skills. I write the backend and he works on the 'pretty'. I get a html template that fits into codeigniter and then put it all together with a bit of glue. Unfortunately as we play more with drupal it becomes apparent that my skills are no longer required for anything more then writing a custom plugin or auditing. So to that end, I'm trying to learn more of his tools of the trade.

I have trouble making pretty graphics and he has trouble grasphing why it is so important to sanitize inputs and not write php sql queries that look like this: "select * from users where id = " . $_GET['username'];

Re:Notepad

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

We have these things at our disposal. Powerful machines capable of processing millions of instructions per second. Sitting on the other side of these devices we have us - the humans. Slow, prone to typos, not as good at storing reference data in a 100% lossless fashion. Logic - something we humans excel at - tells us that while it is important for us to understand our chosen professional fields, these devices are far more capable of handling the repetitive minutia such as telling us when we spelled something wrong, helpfully providing reference documentation specifically relevant to what we're typing at a given moment in time, or even suggesting appropriate variables to use based on data type. This does not excuse us from knowing what we are doing - but it does let us get it done much faster and with fewer flaws than otherwise.

Yes, these tools are no substitution for knowledge and understanding of a subject matter. But if you have that knowledge and understanding but refuse to use tools that make it easier an faster for you to do your job... I'd have to wonder if you were as skilled as you thought you were. If you worked for me I would have to start working for somebody who took more pride in creating a good design quickly using all available tools than in how the aesthetic perfection of his manually-created code demonstrates his superior knowledge.

Re:Notepad

[petermgreen]

Frames work to some extent but linking across different framesets (either different parts of a site or completely different sites) is a pain in the arse since a URL cannot express both a frameset and a set of instructions on how it's frames should be filled.. Some may see that as a feature but IMO the inability to correctly link to any page directly goes against the whole principle of the web.

Re:Notepad

[GameboyRMH]

I use Scite as a Notepad++ alternative on Linux. They're both Scintilla-based and have similar interfaces.

Re:Notepad

[ReverendLoki]

Actually, it has no syntax. Grammar can cover the use of phrases, clauses, and words, as used in a language/culture.

/definition nazi

Re:Notepad

[SimplyGeek]

I installed Drupal back when it was version 4 years ago for my personal site. That got me away from d***ing around with hand coding files and got me on track to working on actual content like I wanted. For a personal site, it's perfect. Wordpress is great too, but if your site grows, you're very limited. Drupal can handle a basic install as a blog easily. And then if you want more features, you always have the option.

Re:Notepad

[daedae]

People use "spoon" or "jelly" in that context? I, thankfully, have never encountered that.

Re:Notepad

[Requiem18th]

Alternatively:

What the hell does "This." mean?!

Well... this is a reference to the instance you are passing the message to.

Re:Notepad

[Chas]

And what if you don't want to shell out for a programmer?

Learn how to do it yourself? Nobody ever said you had to shell out for a programmer.

Then you wind up paying for it on the back end with increased bandwidth consumption, insecure, buggy code, a site that works right in only one browser at one specific resolution, etc.

Using something like Dreamweaver or Expression Web, a designer can create anything they want on their own.

And if these IDEs don't barf and eat the project file, the project file gets chewed by the next version upgrade.
On top of that, the craptastic code spewed by these tools is buggy, insecure, takes longer to load and breaks under multiple platforms, requiring massive amounts of after-the-fact hand-tweaking to fix. If you're going to go to all that trouble, you're better off just doing it from scratch in the first place.

It doesn't matter if the code isn't super optimized to the last byte because nobody will ever see it. It just has to work acceptably.

Sure, nobody will ever see it because these sites take so long to fully load (if they ever fully load due to the buggy code), that the viewer will get disgusted and browse away somewhere else. And what you're missing is, the amount of work needed to make IDE sites "work acceptably" is greater than what is required to simply do the site PROPERLY FROM SCRATCH.

Besides, I'm pretty sure the question being asked had nothing to do with hiring people. You might want to work on those comprehension skills there, buddy.

Seeing as you misread what I said, I'd say that it's your comprehension skills that need the work son.

Re:Notepad

[Chas]

That's just it. There's no "quick fix" single book for this. It's an ongoing process with lots of continuing education.

Re:Notepad

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

damnit. s/working for/looking for

Re:Notepad

[visionbeyond]

I'll take that challenge - of course it in itself is highly situated to have distinct advantages in some languages and disadvantages in others. Don't misunderstand me though, as vim is my preferred editor for doing any quick editing on a configuration file, or pretty much any other task... other than coding.

Many editors have plug-ins that make it pretty powerful, such as validating code including recursive includes and requires for languages such as PHP or Ruby. Some editors can also do pre-compiling of the likes of Java and C. Personally I found a lot of freedom and ability to control the features you personally would use in jEdit, which runs on any platform, so it makes it handy when you don't have a choice for the pre-installed machine you'll be working on. I can do simple or complex regex search and replace for a selection, page, or entire project with one click. Each of the hundreds of languages supported can be custom colorized and is smart enough to separate out each even if all included in the same files (ex. PHP, Javascript, CSS, and HTML in one file).

While I've happily used jEdit for around 10 years, I've seen other good editors as well, such as Kate (although not a fan of KDE) and even editors like Bluefish have come a long way. Even if you use vim, your going to need the colorization plug-in, and the specialized language plug-in, and ..... Point is stock, pretty much every editor is the same. You need to find an editor that fits with your needs and can expand as hopefully your programming progresses

Re:Notepad

[Chas]

Erm, an editor where you can not "configure" the line ending? Rofl.

Are you talking within the purview of the editor or not? If you're talking the final website, you completely missed the point.

All your other points make no sense either.

No. They make sense. You merely don't understand what I'm talking about.

What do web standards or using the wrong fonts to do with the tool you use?

Because with IDEs like this (and the PhotoChop method) you're essentially drawing a pretty picture, then hoping to god it renders properly in multiple browsers. Then investing a bunch of time, space and bandwidth on crappy glue code to make sure it more or less works-ish in more than one browser environment.

Do you really belive that the same idiot, who can not use an IDE correctly, learns "design" by using a text input tool (no notepad is not even an editor)???

Again,the point is completely missed here. I'm saying that IDEs are a SHITTY way to build a website and the code generated by them is an ugly, bloated fuster-cluck that still needs massive hand-tweaking to make it work right. And even then, the sites generated by said IDEs are SEVERELY limited.

Re:Notepad

[Toonol]

Sort of like people who say "spoon" or "jelly" instead of "cool" or "ok".

What? Somebody does that outside of a mental institution? I've never encountered that.

Re:Notepad

[Toonol]

Your snark would have had an element of truth five years ago. Now, there's no real line separating coding and website creation. It's all a seamless mix, and there's enough complexity on both sides to use all the talent that can be thrown at it.

Re:Notepad

[mr_mischief]

I agree except the "server you're hosting on" ... "edit right there". You should probably have a staging server if you actually care about your site. Put a little Athlon XP in the corner with CentOS on it (because that's what your hosting probably is) or some other Linux flavor and edit it there, view it through Apache and the browser, then upload from there to the production server (preferably using scp).

Re:Notepad

[mr_mischief]

yourdomain.net/index.php?page=%27%3BDROP%20TABLE%20pages%3B

Re:Notepad

[equex]

10K text? I can't remember the last time I saw 200 characters of text regarding the same topic on the same page. Usually 10K of text would be paged out to like 100 pages of twitter-sized sentences. bringing the total up to 300MB of crap to display 10K.

Re:Notepad

[ianare]

A simple and effective solution to the problem at hand, but doesn't really address the core issue : the high likelyhood of error when doing site-wide changes.

The overhead of dynamic pages is pretty low, and you can just as easily cache the output of your dynamic pages.

Besides, if you are having excessively high load on a site, chances are you can invest in better equipment.

Re:Notepad

[haruchai]

That doesn't help if you've clicked on a link from Google, unfortunately.

Re:Notepad

[FleshMuppet]

I'm not sure you understand what an IDE is. GoLive and Dreamweaver are not IDEs. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, needs to have, among other things, a compiler/interpreter and debugger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment Eclipse is an IDE, VisualStudio and XCode are also IDEs. They are generally used by developers, and any good web developer in this day and age is typically staring at either CSS, Markup, or Code of some sort. Designers clearly need a different environment. But for a good developer, writing the markup should be the easy part. Manipulating it reliably across environments, managing state, etc should be the hard nuts to crack. And notepad is not superior to a good IDE. A GOOD text editor (which notepad is not) is not superior to a good IDE. But I would certainly rather have VIM or TextMate or NotePad++ than plain old notebook if I can't have a decent IDE.

Re:Notepad

[mynuus]

How about this? Home page: http://www.ultraedit.com/products/uestudio.html IDE display: http://www.ultraedit.com/products/uestudio/uestudio_feature_map.html Configuration files handle things such as keywords for a ton 'o languages. Windows for several years [1]. Now on Mac and Linux over the previous 2-3 years. They also have UltraCompare[2], which makes for a nice fraternal twin. Oh, and they've got a standalone version of UltraEdit -- you can install on a thumb drive and tote it around. (I don't get compensation for hawking this stuff) ____________________________ [1] At least 11-12. Back when Microsoft expected you to use FrontPage as your IDE (web design, but when you used something such as a language such as VBScript, it was like dropping a frog in a blender - all of the stuff is there, but you'll never rearrange it for something useful. (unless you're into squishy green frog smoothies). Visual InterDev wasn't much better. TextPad was trying to make inroads against UltraEdit and fell flat on its face. Since that time, ... [2] http://www.ultraedit.com/products/ultracompare.html

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

What, then, does your world view make of my day-to-day pattern of using Vim for most html/css/js, netbeans for all my java, and the command line to tie it all together?

I'd say welcome to the club. (I did say EMACS/vi above....) 8^)

The point I was trying to make is that expecting to find a silver-bullet-style IDE that will magically do everything exactly how you want is a pipe dream, especially where HTML/CSS generation is concerned. The *nix tool-chain approach (such as yours), on the other hand, actually does allow you to do more or less exactly what you need to do. The fact that you've chosen a hybrid environment doesn't really take away from this fundamental point.

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

Nice EMACS plug, but it's not what the OP wants. The OP is maintaining "a trivial site with a couple of pages/templates".

Did everyone miss the fact that I said EMACS or VI?

No, my point stands. Editing HTML/CSS and doing some minor scripting is easier in a decent *nix environment than attempting the same thing in any single IDE.

I've been wrangling websites since the very first graphical browsers were available, and believe me, if there really were a silver-bullet-IDE that allowed me to do everything in one place, I'd be using it.

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

As the number of documents grows, the potential number of links in all other documents grows exponentially

No it doesn't.

Yes, it does. You're assuming one link per document, aren't you? I'm talking about multiple links within the body of the document, which could point to one or all of the others, and/or to an arbitrary number of outside documents as well.

Re:Notepad

[Onymous Coward]

Or you could just edit pageinquestion2.html.

That technique will work for a page or three plus a CSS file or so. If you're changing more than that you might consider subdir/.

Larger edits might do better to be done via dev ---> staging ---> production method.

Re:Notepad

[grcumb]

You have anywhere from 10's to 100's of thousands of relationships between documents, and you somehow think a good RDBMS wouldn't be of help? You may be an amazing site admin, but you're not much of a developer.

And clearly you've not worked a lot with amorphous data sets. The 'relationships' between documents are not formalised or structured in a way that makes storage in an RDBMS useful at all.

I've written and managed a few database-driven sites in my time, but my area of specialisation is unstructured corpuses that require lots of pattern recognition and natural language processing. Relational databases, in this context, are generally of limited usefulness. This is more Google-style stuff than anything else.

I will say, though, that NoSQL looks pretty cool. I'm going to be integrating CouchDB into parts of our system before the year is out.

... And since you mentioned it, I'm actually a better developer than I am a site admin. 8^)

Re:Notepad

[matthewv789]

As others have said, we don't even need to do it, because it's already done.

a) it's in a shared footer file
b) it's using PHP or another language so it already reads the current year

(All of which can be cached to static pages to keep the performance high.)

The other benefit is, what if you WANT something to read "©2010" and not change to 11, somewhere within a page? Your method is, unfortunately, unable to handle such a distinction.

Plus, we can use sed etc. too, when we really need to. (Not so easily in a database, but there are ways there also.)

Re:Notepad

[matthewv789]

Many content management systems can handle links like this without any human intervention (let alone expert human intervention), automatically updating all references within the system to a resource if it moves or changes names (while still being able to use descriptive names that can be changed at will). Some will also automatically add redirects when things move, so that external links coming in to the old URL can continue working as well. If some references need to point to, say, the latest resource in a given category, which can change at any time, that can be handled automatically also.

Not sure that addresses all your issues, but it doesn't really sound like static documents are the only (or even best) way to handle this.

Re:Notepad

[Kagetsuki]

I didn't mean as a regular practice, but occasionally there's those times when you just need to make a quick fix RIGHT NOW and it's those times in particular having a decent editor you are -used to using- is a good thing.

For actual development I run a full LAMP on my own box and work locally, and I use Git to push changes - when I'm comfortable with everything I'll merge the branch I developed on into master. If I screw up somehow and the production server chokes on the new code I just roll back. Lately I've been doing some Rails work (first time really and I'm loving it) so I'll actually just launch the rails/webrick server script without even dealing with Apache AND Rails has this great system where there is a dev branch you can work on separately from production.

But we were talking about editors, and it would seem we both like (g)Vim. You know, because it is f*ing radical. Rock on brother.

Re:Notepad

[hubie]

+1

Re:Notepad

[spauldo]

I wouldn't either.

Why let my enemy have the good stuff?

Re:Notepad

[darkpixel2k]

but being able to flip between documents

What part of "o <filename>" don't you understand?

use refactoring

Real programmers don't need refactoring....whatever the hell that is.

reformatting

"%!tidy" works for me

class reflection

HTML doesn't have classes. Real programmers don't use JavaScript. My webserver is netcat and my ability to respond to incoming requests at 120 words-per-minute. Typing out a JPG is a bit of a pain though.

Any more complains I can dismiss condescendingly? ;)

Re:Notepad

[wwphx]

Thank you for mentioning TextMate, I'll be checking it out. I've been using TextWrangler since I went Mac 4 years ago and haven't been too impressed. I cut my teeth on B.R.I.E.F. and am using TextPad on my work Windows machines.

Funny thing is, I recently came across my install files for Brief. It still works under XP command boxes! Doesn't have long file name support, but the R does stand for Reconfigurable....

Re:Notepad

[wwphx]

We just replaced a static site with CMS and distributed content authors, I think we're over 12,000 pages, so not a truly huge site. I conducted Stage 1 training last week for a new bunch of authors, basic HTML, more advanced HTML, and CSS. I was quite pleased that 5 of the 7 who took the subsequent test scored over 90%.

CMS and distributed content authors is definitely the way to go for large sites. It took forever getting content edited or added under the old structure, but part of the reason for that was the person doing the updates had other duties and was not a web/HTML expert.

Re:Notepad

[dotancohen]

Hey, I've been writing websites in VI since 1998, as a hobby not a profession, so I agree with you. But I disagree that a text editor is what the OP needs.

I actually like the suggestions of CMSs. Drupal might be a good choice.

Re:Notepad

[xeon13]

get free notes on diss.

Re:Notepad

[RockDoctor]

Firstly, my error was a simple typo. So my finger didn't hit the r hard enough. Big deal.

Secondly,

you didn't check your own work before posting it where the world can see it.

Big deal - you've just shown the world that you're a sloppy worker, unable to QC yourself when you're acting for your own self about something that you're obviously interested enough in to comment in a (moderately well) respected public forum.

What are you going to expect people to conclude about your other work and activities?

Perhaps if Slashdot had a "preview my post before it becomes visible to the rest of the world, so that I can do my readership the minor honour of looking as if I give a shit about what I'm saying" button. Needs a snazzier title though. Suggestions?

(Two typos and one ambiguity caught. Preach <-> practice.)

Re:Notepad

[cbiltcliffe]

HTML doesn't have classes. Real programmers don't use JavaScript. My webserver is netcat and my ability to respond to incoming requests at 120 words-per-minute. Typing out a JPG is a bit of a pain though.

Real websites don't have images on them! Just static pages of text with the occasional heading.

Get off my lawn!!

Re:Notepad

[Blakey Rat]

That would be the point of using a web development IDE.

Visual Studio on Windows can handle it. So can Aptana Studio. And Coda on Macs, if that's still around...

Re:Notepad

[Dwonis]

You're writing Java code, aren't you?

ubiquitous

[Anonymous Coward]

In before emacs vs vi...

Emacs

[betterunixthanunix]

Emacs? Emacs.

Re:Emacs

[Pharmboy]

I use pico (yes, I really still install pine) or notepad. I still have an old copy of FrontPage 98 as well, which makes really ugly markup, but is adequate to create a tabled template if you then go and hand edit it in text mode. Now that I am using CSS for most everything, well, I still use notepad, pico and a little FP98. This includes a couple of ecommerce sites and a dozen "misc" sites, which means many hundreds of pages that get updated from time to time but rarely replaced. I just add pages as I need. We manage to do millions in sales this way. Again, ecommerce, so the goal is KISS and we don't add but maybe 100 pages a year, but these are still decent looking sites and take very little to create. Even less to change the look of all of them through CSS.

I never understood why an IDE was "required", nor have I ever found one that was less hassle than just doing it by hand. Would love to find one that was truly simple and fast, instead of all the bloated crap I've tried over the years.

Re:Emacs

[egyptiankarim]

http://xkcd.com/378/

Re:Emacs

[NemoinSpace]

fatally incurious

ha ha - have to write that one down.

Re:Emacs

[mabhatter654]

That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS ... Back to text editing)

Re:Emacs

[Scarletdown]

I then transfer the mp3 to the machine and the script listens to it and Cello! creates the website exactly the way the customer describes it!

Fixed that for you. :p

Re:Emacs

[c1ay]

I'll second Emacs. Emacs was mature web site development software before there were websites. How much more 'long haul' are you looking for?

Re:Emacs

[Zardoz Speaks]

Real programmers use copy con filename.zip!

Re:Emacs

[vlm]

That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS ... Back to text editing)

For real? If I needed to change something on hundreds of pages, I'd fire up vi and edit a single css file or edit a single perl (or whatever) script. Or use the magic of server side includes, etc. Do people really do stuff like have one individual css file for each html page?

Re:Emacs

[vlm]

That's the point of an IDE... to edit hundreds of pages at once, in a consistent manner. (although if you have hundreds of pages you should use a CMS ... Back to text editing)

For real? If I needed to change something on hundreds of pages, I'd fire up vi and edit a single css file or edit a single perl (or whatever) script. Or use the magic of server side includes, etc. Do people really do stuff like have one individual css file for each html page?

Re:Emacs

[realityimpaired]

Some people do, yes.

Having a CMS of some sort makes it easier for the content updates to actually update content without having to edit the files manually. You define the stylesheet, the header, the footer, the layout, then they add the news items which automatically take the formatting that's already designed. It's not really any different from doing it in static pages that look like:

<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
<!--#include FILE="header.html" -->
your content here
<!--#include FILE="footer.html" -->
</body>
</html>

It's just moving the filesystem from an actual filesystem into a database.

Re:Emacs

[lucag]

I find the combo
emacs with nxhtml and CEDET (for php)
very nice and powerful (the only inconvenience is the startup time with CEDET, but that is what you get if you want semantic analysis performed by the editor).
I seem to remember there should be also something running under eclipse, though.

regards,
  lg

Re:Emacs

[wertigon]

I know you jest, but seriously, Emacs has a *wonderful* editing tool for webpages called nxhtml. Why is it wonderful? Because it has a sane way of handling inline JS-, PHP and CSS code. This feature alone blows all other editors out of the water.

If you want a WYSIWYG, though, I'd have to reccommend KompoZer.

Re:Emacs

[ryantmer]

Finally, somebody that knows the difference between French and string instruments! Thank you!

Re:Emacs

[BrokenHalo]

I fart in the general direction of WYSIWYG. True editors (by which I mean Butterflies, TECO, Emacs and just possibly vi) should be YAFIYGI (You Asked For It, You Got It).

Re:Emacs

[Krojack]

Why not use Nano instead of Pico? Nano is a Pico clone only without the need to install Pine. Also has color formatting support if you like that stuff.

I use Nano myself and just hand type everything.

Re:Emacs

[Scarletdown]

Finally, somebody that knows the difference between French and string instruments! Thank you!

Thanks. That is becoming my standard FTFY miscorrection for viola when voila was intended.

Besides, there's always room for cello.

Re:Emacs

[Cyberax]

Not even close.

Check the http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/features/ - it has support for inline JS and CSS editing. With inspections, autocomplete and refactorings. There are also nice features like highlighting and syntax checks for regular expressions inside the JS code.

Oh, there are also lightning-fast "Find usages" feature and code navigation for JS and CSS.

It's miles ahead of _everything_ else in usability and features.

Re:Emacs

[wwphx]

Years ago I wrote an HTML generator in Microsoft Access. I had a large number of jokes, I could plug them in to a database and it would generate web pages that had one joke and first, last, previous, next links. Worked pretty slick, I still have the code around somewhere.

Then again, I write binary digital clocks to test out new programming languages that I'm learning, so I freely admit to being more than a little strange.

Re:Emacs

[michiko]

you must see diss for your.

Dreamweaver

[sarku]

Adobe Dreamweaver. Been stable for 15 years or more.

Re:Dreamweaver

[PhantomHarlock]

I've been using dreamweaver for a long time now. It has not substantially changed and is good for editing run of the mill static web pages with a template.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work, we call Dreamweaver "Nightmareweaver."

It is full of bugs that don't necessarily break things, but constantly mess up your productivity.

It's full of stupid thoughtless "features" like a URL text box that's only about 30 characters wide, and a "check links" command that doesn't work on a page unless you've set up a complete site. The way it handles CSS is over-complicated, and I've had more than a few pages' content simply "vanish" from the design editor because it couldn't figure out the div layout.

And honestly, Adobe, what's the point of selling a WYSIWYG HTML editor that still makes you go into the code to fix formatting?

The only positive things I can say are, 1) if you edit code directly, DW doesn't fuck with it, and 2) tag autocomplete is easy to get used to.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Dracos]

Still used as a crutch by self-professed "web designers" and clueless recruiters of such.

Dreamweaver is a tool, not a skill; same as vim, Emacs, Notepad++, Eclipse, or any other editor.

When was the last time you heard a craftsman get praised for having a tool, rather than possessing true skill?

Other than the boasting "designer" with his masterful command of drag-and-drop but merely an apprentice's comprehension of what his tool produces for him, you never did.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Dreamweaver back since it was HomeSite.

All around a very good product that has so far lasted for the past decade.
It is more oriented towards the "I want to code, but see what I am doing" crowd, but it does so very well.

Aside from that, since you are obviously a Mac User, I would highly recommend looking into RapidWeaver, as it is very capable, surprisingly so for a drag-and-drop editing application, and you can post whatever you make on a server very easily as it is just HTML and Javascript.

If you need something a little more comprehensive with server-side scripting support and basic drag-and-drop forms, I would recommend considering a CMS application, such as ModX, Wordpress, Drupal or Joomla (in order of consideration).

Re:Dreamweaver

[tycoex]

Actually, I'd say that the difference between a professional craftsman and a hobbyist who builds stuff in his garage is often largely because the professional has a much larger assortment of tools to use.

Re:Dreamweaver

[fermion]

Dreamweaver is the application that seems to have long legs. it is assumed, that if another commercial application were made available and was succesful,. Adobe would do all it could to kill it as they did Golive. I used Golive, I liked Golive, and it was killed off to encourage the use of Flash. Unforgivable.

There seems to be one other HTML Editor in current version, Anacrophila, but I have never used it and it might go away like all the others, but it seems to be the one and only no cost solution. While I sympathise with the smart asses that suggest Emacs and Vum , and feel sorry for the smart asses that suggest notepad, these clearly do not meet the requirement of an HTML editor. Well, maybe Emacs, but then you get an OS that looks like an HTML editor.

Personally, I am moving away from hand coding my HTML pages of using a WYSIWYG editor. There are enough script packages that do generally what I want that I can just use them. I think this is why the HTML editors development is becoming less popular. The availability of high quality scripts.

Re:Dreamweaver

[JMJimmy]

I completely agree - Dreamweaver is horrid.

For a text editor I would recommend HK Tools (paid - since) or HTML Kit (free) available since 2004.

For a WYSIWIG editor CKEditor would be a good bet. It's far from perfect but there's no such thing as a great WYSIWIG. At least this one is free but with optional paid support, has been around since 2003 and shows no sign of going away.

Re:Dreamweaver

[larry bagina]

On the Mac, CS doesn't stand for "Creative Suite", it stands for "Complete Shit". I like Dreamweaver on Windows (though I liked it better before Adobe fucked it up) and bought it on the Mac but threw it out in favor of Coda. (Another possibility in MacLand is Espresso, too.).

If I was a rubytard, I would probably recommend nanoc or jekyll.

Re:Dreamweaver

[peragrin]

No the professional is the one who gets paid to do the work with those tools.

I know an old mostly retired engineer whose "tooshed" would make most professional machinists happy.

He can literally build you anything mechanical out of almost any material as long as all you need is a one off part.

Re:Dreamweaver

[tehniobium]

Actually that's just what they want to convince you! If you truly believe it would take very expensive tools to do the job professionally, then I guess there's next to no chance that you'll do it yourself, as the investment is too large.

This reminds me of the kind B.S. chefs have been telling us for an eternity: all that matters is you get fresh and awesome ingredients, then you'll have great flavor. If you live by this you'll be making pretty uninspiring dishes - eventually, you'll put it down to lack of talent, and the restaurants win :)

I'm not saying there's a conspiracy by the way - just pointing out that the above statement is misguided...

Re:Dreamweaver

[amicusNYCL]

Dreamweaver is a tool, not a skill ... When was the last time you heard a craftsman get praised for having a tool, rather than possessing true skill?

You realize the guy is asking about which tools to use, right? It's a fact that Dreamweaver has been one of the most stable tools for creating basic web sites.

Re:Dreamweaver

[syousef]

Actually, I'd say that the difference between a professional craftsman and a hobbyist who builds stuff in his garage is often largely because the professional has a much larger assortment of tools to use.

There are many differences between hobbyist and professional apart from the tools:
- Professional may spend 10x as long doing the work -> more practice, more experience
- Professional tackles all parts of his job, doesn't pick and choose what he feels like doing -> Wider range of experience
- Professional will avoid taking on the job without adequate tools, whereas hobbyist may try to wing it -> More predictable results
- Professional is held accountable by standards other than his own
- Professional will avoid all work that is not for profit -> Less range in experience

Re:Dreamweaver

[GCsoftware]

I'm a tad confused about your comment re: chefs and awesome ingredients - if you have good ingredients, it's pretty easy to make good food. With mediocre ingredients you need a lot of skill to make good food..

Re:Dreamweaver

[Anonymous Coward]

And this one time, at band camp...

Re:Dreamweaver

[antifoidulus]

Dreamweaver is a tool, not a skill; same as vim, Emacs, Notepad++, Eclipse, or any other editor.

Emacs isn't a tool, it's a sign of either severe masochistic tendencies or a desperate cry for help, because obviously anyone that uses it is a glutton for punishment.

ducks

Re:Dreamweaver

[tepples]

No the professional is the one who gets paid to do the work with those tools.

Which is why the professional can often (but not always, as you point out) have better tools than a given amateur.

Re:Dreamweaver

[mrmeval]

Yes but the craftsman is stuck with what his tools can make. The person in his garage who makes his own tools can and has gone farther and done more or have been far more brilliant with less.

Re:Dreamweaver

[AlienIntelligence]

I'm a tad confused about your comment re: chefs and awesome ingredients - if you have good ingredients, it's pretty easy to make good food.

With mediocre ingredients you need a lot of skill to make good food..

What he is saying, all these asshat chefs that say fresh
ingredients are all you need... while they are sitting in
their multi-million dollar castle (kitchen).

All you need are the BASIC cooking utensils... THEN
all you need are fresh ingredients.

-AI

Re:Dreamweaver

[JWSmythe]

    Not all professionals, nor all amateurs, are true craftsmen though.

    I've seen people with very impressive tools in their workshop, and couldn't fix problems. They ask me, and I ask for a small handful of tools, and fix the problem quickly.

    It's never the cost of your tools, it's how you use what you have. ... and I do my coding in vim or UltraEdit32, depending on which platform the workstation I'm at is. No syntax highlighting, no autocompletes. I've seen too many people who use technological crutches, and can't see the obvious problem in front of them. If they aren't spoon fed everything, they're lost.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Nemyst]

Surely you must mean Aptana?

Re:Dreamweaver

[ToasterMonkey]

Actually, I'd say that the difference between a professional craftsman and a hobbyist who builds stuff in his garage is often largely because the professional has a much larger assortment of tools to use.

I think they also typically differ in how much discipline is exercised Not only the tools, but whole processes differ between projects of different scopes, giving the experienced craftsman a bigger mental toolbox.

Re:Dreamweaver

[hazem]

All you need are the BASIC cooking utensils... THEN
all you need are fresh ingredients.

Alton Brown seems to espouse this idea that you don't need lots of fancy gadgets; just a good set of the basics. I've heard him say several times that the only tool in his kitchen that is made for just one purpose is his fire extinguisher.

Re:Dreamweaver

[trvd1707]

I use bluefish. It's like dreamweaver, but it's open source.

Re:Dreamweaver

[ToiletDuk]

Aptana is a bloated piece of sluggishness unsuitable for development by those not in a Coma.

Re:Dreamweaver

[jjp9999]

I used Dreamweaver for a good while. Really though, after you do Web design for a while it's best to just go straight to the code - plus you can't test PHP in Dreamweaver, which is a big problem if you're trying to work with Wordpress. Lately I've just been using Smultron (which is free). Coda is also a great app though - better than Smultron (it has great preview features), but it will run you about $100.

Re:Dreamweaver

[caution live frogs]

You mean Arachnophilia? I used that ages ago but hated the Java version, so dumped it for Notepad++. These days TextWrangler does everything I need. WYSIWYG editors, feh. If you can't parse the code you shouldn't be building the page. If you are relying on a WYSIWYG editor you are not a designer, you are a hobbyist. And I say this as a definite hobbyist, even though I prefer a plain text editor. I have a site, I get lots of hits, but I know enough to know that I am not a pro. HTML, Javascript, CSS. That's my limit, aside from a few *nix command line tools. I am not fast enough or good enough to make more than a few bucks here and there helping others maintain sites. And I'm that good only because I've been hand-coding HTML since 1995 or so. If I made more money at it I'd be better, because I'd do it more often - but for a full-time research scientist I figure I do OK, and am happy with what I can do.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Larryish]

vi is a skill.

fucker.

(this was posted this with vi and netcat)

Re:Dreamweaver

[rtb61]

So the real question is, what software can I use, so that I can pretend to be a web page designer without knowing all that messy stuff like html, css, xml and javascript/perl/php or even that weird server side stuff.

Answer, then reason all those graphical web page designer software falls over is basically because it is crap. People expect to be able to design web pages like all those professional on the web, rather than clunking amateurish single fixed page documents and are unhappy when they can't.

For people who want to learn there is of course notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ and wampserver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WampServer (if you really want to see how your web page will be served).

Re:Dreamweaver

[wisty]

It doesn't really matter if the ingredients are actually fresh - that's half marketing, and half a catch-all phrase for "good" (not spoilt, ripe if it's a fruit or vegetable, appropriate cuts of meat, avoid cheap manufactured crap, etc).

Actually, the reason chefs seem to like simple fresh dishes is threefold - nobody is likely to really hate one one of the ingredients, it's quicker to make (so you can pump out more dishes), and it's not going to be too interesting.

Chicken with glazed oranges sounds a little interesting, but you can make a good guess if you will like it or not. Chicken with glazed oranges, juniper berries, foies gras, and fried shallots *might* be nice (I've no idea), but it just sounds a little weird.

Re:Dreamweaver

[JMJimmy]

I've tried Notepad++ a bunch of times and I've never found it to be very efficient or powerful at least in comparison to alternatives like HK Tools or Aptana.

Re:Dreamweaver

[GrantRobertson]

I use bluefish. It's like dreamweaver, but it's open source.

I'll have to check it out. I need something free but useful to recommend for people who can't afford stuff like Dreamweaver.

Re:Dreamweaver

[GrantRobertson]

So I took a quick look at Bluefish. It looks kind of like Dreamweaver except that it has no WYSIWYG frame. One of the reasons I love Dreamweaver is that I can put the WYSIWYG frame next to the code frame and see both at the same time.

Re:Dreamweaver

[kikito]

The difference between a hobbyist tennist and a professional one is the amount of tennis rackets he has.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Eivind]

This is less and less the case. Wages are so high, relative to technology-costs that the amateur has tools closer and closer in quality to those of the professional.

It used to be that a good-quality studio for recording sound, good photographic equipment, workstation-class computers etc cost a years salary (give or take).

Today you get reasonably pro equipment in each of these fields for something more like a months salary. (infact the computer-setup that most professional programmers here in Norway use is closer to a weeks pay than to a months pay in value)

Re:Dreamweaver

[yomammamia]

DreamWeaver is acceptable even for the professional providing it is used correctly.

In my experience problems are introduced in two ways:
When it is used for important code that needs care and attention (or backend code in general). This particularly applies for large projects. This is symptomatic of the golden hammer approach, where DreamWeaver is used as much as possible rather than as much as is optimal for the entire cycle. The tool is much better adjusted for building and prototyping views. It should not see much use beyond that.
When its output is trusted implicitly along with any actions it might perform. What you see isn't always what you get and what you want isn't always something you can see anywhere else but in lower levels.

True though it may be that DreamWeaver can be used productively in some rolls and situations, what benefit it does bring hardly seems worth it for the price.

Re:Dreamweaver

[tehcyder]

The difference between a hobbyist tennist and a professional one is the amount of tennis rackets he has.

No, it's not. The only significant difference is that a professional gets paid for it, for every other case there are exceptions.

Re:Dreamweaver

[hvm2hvm]

The OP asked for a tool, the GP posted a tool's name. Why are you diverting the discussion towards "people think using dreamweaver makes them web designers". It may be a real issue, it may be true but it's not relevant to the question.

Re:Dreamweaver

[gravis777]

I've been using Dreamweaver for about 12 years, great piece of software - for static websites, and if you want to maintain it yourself.

However, from some of the previous pieces of software the author has used, it sounds like his best solution is a content management system. Sadly, for most of these, it does mean a rewrite of the site, but it sounds like he is doing that anyways every couple of years.

Go with something like Wordpress http://wordpress.org/ or Joomla http://www.joomla.org/ . You just do not know the relief it is when clients have their own ability to change content - both for stress on your end and to get stuff done in a timely fashion on their end. Both (especially Wordpress, not as familer with Joomla) have been around for years, and are pretty well established. And many hosting providers will install these on your site free of charge, so all you really have to do is set it up. I would look into some themes though - the default layouts for Wordpress kind of irritate me - maybe because I have seen so many sites using that default template that its gotten old. But there are TONS of themes and plugins out there for both systems.

Re:Dreamweaver

[CptNerd]

All you need are the BASIC cooking utensils... THEN all you need are fresh ingredients.

I prefer my old FORTRAN utensils...

Re:Dreamweaver

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Ever see a master carpenter make a house with no tools? Ever try to write code on punchcards? How about executing code witjout a computer in such a way that it produces meaningful and useful results? Of course you have to know what these tools do to use them effectively; but using them in no way makes you less of a craftsman. It is understanding of underlying principles combined with the *effective* use of the tools at your disposal that elevate you to the rank of master.

When was the last time you heard of a craftsman getting praised for practicing his craft with only rudimentary tools when he could have done it in half the time using complex tools? (please don't cite the Amish - while the tools they use are not "modern", they are also far from rudimentary.)

Re:Dreamweaver

[alta]

Dreamweaver was never homesite. At one point they even shipped together, along with another css Editor. I think this was around DW MX. They didn't have CSS support or very good color coding or ASP/PHP/CF support, so they bundled a CSS editor, TopStyle, and Homesite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Dreamweaver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite

But anyway, yeah, I'm still using dreamweaver too. I spend a lot of time in code view, but I don't see any point in hand writing a bunch of CSS or tables, or hrefs or whatever.

Plus I love the templates. It's a great solution for a low page site as opposed to using a template engine like smarty, or a CMS.

Re:Dreamweaver

[houghi]

This is because many people think that making a website is one skill. It is at least two. Designing and coding. In general designers are not coders and coders are not designers.

So what happens is that they let the designer do the coding, because it looks great. The result is people asking what tool to use on a technical level.

And often you would also need somebody who understands how humans react to the interface.

Re:Dreamweaver

[kikito]

You might want to check your irony detector. It might be malfunctioning.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Woadan]

Homesite was an Allaire product that Macromedia got when they bought Allaire. When Adobe got hold of Macromedia, they kept DW and stopped updating Homesite. I hate Adobe for so many reasons, but this one is still at the top of my list. Homesite never did anything to my code just because I opened it in the editor. DW did. FrontPage did. Grrr. ;)

Re:Dreamweaver

[JMJimmy]

I'd say it's a lot more than that in an ideal situation!

1) Design
2) Server (maintaining/configuring the physical box)
3) Security (Server software, server-side code, JavaScript code)
4) Code monkey (server and client side code)
5) Database

I've been a subcontractor in web development for years and been a bit of all of these roles but it's really shocking how they expect code monkeys to fill in for the other roles to save money. There are a lot of cross-over skills that allow people to function in the other areas but no one can be an expert on it all - there's just too many minutia.

Re:Dreamweaver

[trvd1707]

It's just so easy to click a button and see the page on the browser, that I don't miss the wysiwyg feature of dreamweaver. I used both and I once you got used to the html tags, it's way faster to maintain the site using bluefish.

Re:Dreamweaver

[GrantRobertson]

It is way easier for me to just type what I want in the format I want in real time. In addition, this is what most regular users want in and HTML editor. I understand you are primarily a developer, and someone else likely works out the copy. But most regular people don't have that luxury. Thanks for your input though.

Re:Dreamweaver

[mynuus]

no syntax highlighting? UltraEdit (at least UEStudio) has the ability to use configuration files to get the highlighting + plenty of other stuff. I have a "lifetime license" for it and UltraCompare and the combination is perfect for me - there are oodles of features most people don't see, but still get by with UEStudio.( As far as platforms, they've added Linux & Mac in the previous 2-3 years.) UltraEdit vs. UEStudio: [url]http://www.ultraedit.com/products/uestudio/differences.html[/url] UEStudio: [url]http://www.ultraedit.com/products/uestudio/uestudio_feature_map.html[/url]

Re:Dreamweaver

[JWSmythe]

    Ya, I know it's there. Part of it is laziness on my behalf. I work with enough different languages, that irregularities in syntax highlighting of any sort become a problem. It's easier to not have them at all.

    Once upon a time, I did set up all the toolbars in a way that I was comfortable with. I only did it at work though, and not at home, so I never ended up using them. I do like the vertical line showing the matching of brackets. :)

    In real life (as I know it), I end up working on a lot of different machines. Sometimes I'm sitting on my home machine. Sometimes a laptop, a friends computer, or on the console of some random machine that either belongs to my employer, or someone I'm doing a favor for. I may have UltraEdit in front of me right now (as matter of fact, it's open right now), but I may get a random call from someone asking to get on their server and fix something. Despite how much I don't like notepad, if I have to get on a Windows machine and make changes quick, that may be my only solution.

    The only other thing I use UltraEdit for is the FTP/SCP manager. Pointy-clickie to a file is nice. I only use it as a comfortable text editor though. Anything more cripples me from being able to perform at my best under any circumstances.

Re:Dreamweaver

[wwphx]

One thing that I really like DW for is site management. It's so easy to modify a page and squirt it up to the server. With it also maintaining the directory structure, I think it's pretty sweet. I just learned CSS (or the fundamentals thereof) two weeks ago, so I'll be looking at tuning up my sites and we'll see how much I like DW when I'm done with that.

Re:Dreamweaver

[wwphx]

I remember when I was a teenager just getting in to photography in the late 70's. We were at a county fair somewhere and some guy was walking around with a Nikon 35mm around his neck. I asked him if it was an FM or an FE (at the time you could only tell them apart by looking at them top-down). He had no idea, he just bought it because his son thought he needed a camera, and he had to buy Nikon.

A craftsman can make wonders out of poor tools, an idiot will usually make mediocre garbage out of expensive tools. It's definitely the skill of the craftsman that makes the diff.

Re:Dreamweaver

[wwphx]

My wife bought me a gorgeous set of German knives for our anniversary a few years back, and I find myself consistently using two: 6" chef's and a 3" paring knife. On rare occasion I'll use others, for example, an el cheapo santoku for cutting up the dog's pills, but those two are my go-to knives.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Lehk228]

is the customer happy? if so then it doesn't matter if the designer couldn't add a line break or write a stylesheet to safe his|her life

Re:Dreamweaver

[lanswitch]

Arachnophilia supports Unicode as of 03/31/2011. Can someone tell the Slashdot Designers that they should update their wysiwyg editor?

Re:Dreamweaver

[uglyduckling]

I had a try with Rapidweaver. The problem is, it's a totally template-based tool, terrible for actually editing web pages. I think it's a reasonable tool for a web developer to give to clients along with custom templates to edit static pages for themselves. I was really hoping for something that would be suitable for basic WYSIWYG editing with a code view, but lighter than Dreamweaver. Sadly, Rapidweaver isn't it.

Dreamweaver

[toastar]

Isn't Dreamweaver still around? I seem to remember it doing a pretty good job coloring my code. Plus the instant preview was kinda nice.

Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know im kind of a black sheep around here, but Expression Web & Visual Studio Web combined make a pretty solid base...

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

No a black sheep wouldn't willingly enslave themselves to Microsoft. (Too soon?)

Re:Microsoft?

[Tridus]

That might not be a bad idea if it was all in one tool, but the artificial split between Visual Studio and the Expression stuff is unforgivable nonsense. It's even more galling with WPF then it is with web stuff though, as the VS WPF editor is really bad and basically forces you to do stuff by hand or go spend a boatload of money on Expression Blend (or do what seems to be the new thing to do: not bother with WPF).

Re:Microsoft?

[aztracker1]

They're actually pretty decent, with the lates 2010 updates and html5 markup option work well enough, though sass/less support would be nice and chirpy is a must have plugin for web dev.

Re:Microsoft?

[xavdeman]

I know im kind of a black sheep around here, but Expression Web & Visual Studio Web combined make a pretty solid base...

Yeah, Expression Web is pretty useful, it's like having a CSS2,3 and HTML handbook at the ready all the time. The WYSIWYG stuff is just an added bonus, the real value (for me) is how you can quickly edit properties.

Re:Microsoft?

[sshirley]

Ya know, there are a few things that Microsoft got right: 1) Office, 2) SQL Server, and 3) Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a GREAT IDE. While it's not quite as extensible as Eclipse, you can still develop plugins for it that will do pretty much anything. If you're into PHP, you can (with a plugin) do PHP on it. Plus you can step through the PHP *AND* JavaScript code. I'm no M$ fanboy, but they have produced some gems among the steaming piles of dung.

vim

[Firehed]

Or butterflies if you've got far more patience than I.

Recommendation

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Bluefish on Ubuntu. It's very functional and has enough longevity as far as I know.

Re:Recommendation

[Scarletdown]

I use Bluefish on Ubuntu. It's very functional and has enough longevity as far as I know.

I second the recommendation for Bluefish on the *nix side of things. That has replaced Quanta Plus as my standard html editor on my Debian systems, since QP is no longer in Sid.

On the Windows side of the house, Arachnophilia is a good one to use.

Re:Recommendation

[blind monkey 3]

I use Bluefish on Ubuntu. It's very functional and has enough longevity as far as I know.

I second the recommendation for Bluefish on the *nix side of things. That has replaced Quanta Plus as my standard html editor on my Debian systems, since QP is no longer in Sid.

On the Windows side of the house, Arachnophilia is a good one to use.

Third it. Feature list.

Re:Recommendation

[Scarletdown]

Third it. Feature list.

Oh! I never realized Bluefish was available for Windows as well. This may mean retiring Arachnophilia altogether, if the Windows version of Bluefish is as good as the Linux version.

Granted, there's nothing wrong with Arach, but I would rather standardize on the same app across platforms.

Re:Recommendation

[Just Brew It!]

Fourthed! I don't do a lot of web coding, but Bluefish + a local copy of Apache + an assortment of Web browsers to test cross-browser compatibility (using VMs as needed for the ones that run on other OSes) seems like a very sensible way to set up a Web development workstation to me.

I use Bluefish as my general programming editor too; basically I use it for anything more complex than quick config file hacking (God made vi for that). I've become enough of a Bluefish fan that I've started building it from upstream source when new releases come out, rather than waiting for the new version to show up in the Ubuntu repositories...

Re:Recommendation

[AliasMarlowe]

I use Bluefish on Ubuntu. It's very functional and has enough longevity as far as I know.

Actually, Bluefish is pretty good; my kids both use it to maintain their pages.

I occasionally use Bluefish, but prefer to use whetever text editor is in front of me - typically mousepad or leafpad, depending which PC I'm on. Indeed, I often have to clean up their page layout a little, but this is more a result of inconsistency in page design (if any) or haphazard formatting (they're kids) than a criticism of Bluefish.

Coda rocks!

[second_coming]

For the Mac I'd say use Coda: http://www.panic.com/coda/

Re:Coda rocks!

[itchythebear]

I second Coda, I've been using it since close to day one. Since your trying to avoid doing a lot of coding by hand and want your website to just work, I recommend using a CMS like drupal or wordpress. At some point you'll get frustrated with the lack of options with something like Dreamweaver or iWeb. As a bonus, if you ever decide you want to start coding by hand, the syntax highlighting for php (what wordpress and drupal are both written in) is fantastic.

Wrong tag

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll or something, but I think this should be tagged as "designer", not "developer".

Re:Wrong tag

[index0]

To read more on the subject, do an internet search for: html loop OR iterate "not a programming"
http://www.google.ca/search?q=html+loop+OR+iterate+%22not+a+programming%22

NVU

[Lehk228]

NVU / KompoZer, it's been a long time since i used it but it was pretty nice back when i did, and it's open source so it can't ever fully die

Re:NVU

[ArundelCastle]

and it's open source so it can't ever fully die

Actually I was surprised NVU wasn't mentioned specifically by the OP. Since the only "real" release of NVU is still version 1.0 from 2005, it fits perfectly with the dilemma described. Unofficial patches to renamed abandonware shouldn't be what open source is about. Take the code and make it work for yourself by all means, but it's not a solution for anyone that needs to get a job done.

Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CSS

[Anonymous Freak]

Notepad, TextEdit, TeX, emacs, vi, pico, whatever.

Never have to worry about the editor itself going obsolete because of emerging HTML standards, never have to worry about the tool itself disappearing.

Find yourself random web host of choice (I like nearlyfreespeech) that supports direct upload of files, no fiddly web interface forced on you, and voila! Instant future-proof website!

(Yes, I'm going to have to be weaned off iWeb+MobileMe for my personal domain, too. I'm a lazy bastard, and iWeb was too easy. Now I'll have to go back to hand-coding and/or at least find a simple-to-upload-to-from-iWeb host; which, now that I think about it, nearlyfreespeech should do.)

notepad++

[Anonymous Coward]

notepad++ you can't go wrong.

Re:Notepad++

[penzler]

+1 I've used Dreamweaver for a while but it's not really good at everything it's suppose to do. Code highlighting is great in Notepad++ and it's lightweight and versatile. Dreamweaver has good server integration (I feel like its backend could use some work but it knows how to work with servers). My answer: there isn't one.

Re:Notepad++

[jank1887]

I was always fond of CuteHTML.

PSPad

[slayster]

PSPad http://www.pspad.com/ has been my editor of choice for many years now. It does everything I need it to. I've never seen a visual editor which produces code that I'm willing to put my name behind.

Content Management

[TimTucker]

If you look at the solutions for "editing" sites that scale, ultimately you'll find that what you're really looking for isn't a better visual editor, but rather a content management platform.

WordPress has a pretty decent track record for longevity, but there are plenty of other options out there as well.

Re:Content Management

[spinkham]

I would recommend a static site generator instead.

You get the benefits of a CMS without the server side software requirements, updates, and security problems.

I use nanoc and love it, but there's tons of other choices out there.

Re:Content Management

[metrometro]

Look, none of the WYSIWYG HTML editors work well. They fought a three way battle against hand coding and content managers, and it's now down to just the two. Because they work better. It's a feature.

Re:Content Management

[foniksonik]

As long as you don't need any on demand dynamic data driven stuff (no account system, no comments system, etc) though you can get third party JavaScript based solutions for some things ( comments, ratings).

Re:Content Management

[LWATCDR]

That combined with nosupportlinuxhosting.com. You have to buy a year at a time but at $12 a year you are all set.

Re:Content Management

[nine-times]

This sounds right to me. Maybe you don't even need to administer the site, but use a hosted solution instead. That way, you can really focus on content creation.

But part of it is also having realistic expectations. It's very likely that in 10 years, the web will be a different beast, and the view of what constitutes a "good website" will change too. As the web changes, the tools used to create it must also change. Whatever you come up with, don't expect that you'll be using the same tools in 20 years. In computer terms, 5 years kind of is the "long haul".

Instead of trying to keep your tools constant, try to keep your data portable. One of the advantages of something like Wordpress is that it's so popular that, when it gets superseded by other things, there will certainly be methods to translate Wordpress into those new forms-- and it's generally easier to pull information from a database in a sensible way than to pull it out of HTML.

So what I'm saying is, don't focus on making sure that you can use the same editor for the next 20 years, and instead focus on trying to make sure you can pull your old content into a new form every 5 years. That's how you future-proof.

Re:Content Management

[spinkham]

http://disqus.com/ lets you do comments very well, and is used by many large customers.

Re:Content Management

[Tridus]

Technically you can tell MS Word to output HTML, but what you get is really bad HTML.

That's the problem with most WSYWIG HTML editors. HTML doesn't lend itself well to WSYWIG editing and so what you always get is really bad HTML. If you want to do it well, you have to learn some HTML and use a good text editor.

If you don't mind shitty HTML then you have more options, but you're not going to find many people advocating them here.

Re:Content Management

[drgould]

Seriously, isn't there anything (cheap/free) out there that will just let somebody edit a web site in WYSIWYG mode?

Nvu (which is based on Netscape Composer, but hasn't been updated for years), KompoZer (which is based on Nvu, but hasn't been updated in over a year) and BlueGriffon (where do they get these names) which seems to be under active development.

The last time I used KompoZer it worked, but crashed every once in a while and wasn't HTML 4 compliant. Maybe BlueGriffon is better.

Re:Content Management

[Animal Farm Pig]

Thanks for that link. Cool service and dirt cheap.

Re:Content Management

[TubeSteak]

WordPress has a pretty decent track record for longevity,

The WordPress platform has a pretty awful track record for security.
The odds are strong you will get hacked by an automated bot scanning for 0-Day exploits.
Or if you don't patch/update constantly, an automated bot scanning for old exploits.

Re:Content Management

[PhrstBrn]

It doesn't just output bad HTML, it puts other random tags and attributes that have no purpose and aren't HTML.

Re:Content Management

[aztracker1]

MS's Expression Web does a decent job for static site gen from templates as well.

Re:Content Management

[tbg58]

I'm really glad to see that you are suggesting a Content Management System. While it's inarguable that knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS make better webmasters, much of the world has moved on and let CMS packages like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, to name a few of the most popular systems, take care of dynamic HTML presentation. Just keep in mind that in any CMS (the ones mentioned all use Apache, MySQL and PHP as the platform stack) you must use security best practices as defined by the community then add your own extra security in things like extended .htaccess entries to prevent most SQL injection keystroke combos. As always, caveat lector!

Re:Content Management

[polymeris]

Agree, and would even go further, applying it to even small sites: Scaling or not, self-contained CMS is the way to go for me, unless I wanted a very fancy site. Edit from anywhere, any OS, no local installation of tools, focus on content.

I personally like PmWiki, but there are a plethora of options, of course.

Re:Content Management

[SageBrian]

I agree with the CMS concept. Though, a static site generator is good also, for security purposes.

Of course, on /. you will be getting a lot of 'code by hand' comments, and those are all true, for people who code by hand. It may be better for them, but not everyone can deal with that.

As the OP mentions, they use software that makes it easier for them to create. GoLive, Apple fisherprice crap, etc. So, they are looking for graphical based software.
As mentioned by someone else, Dreamweaver has been pretty stable for a long long time. If going with a software solution, Dreamweaver may be the way to go.

Long Haul - on the web, especially in web development, long haul is 5 years or less. You have to accept that technology is changing at a blinding pace. It is frustrating, and tiring, but it's the price we pay for progress. It's frustrating when I have to deal with someone that 'does websites' and thinks what they did in 1998 is still valid.

CMS - going with one of the big 3 (arguably Drupal, WordPress, Joomla) is one way to stay focused on content rather than technical code stuff. Be sure to update and patch, and be on a quality server with it's own security. Active opensource projects like these 3 (and others) will help you keep in touch with the changing landscape.

No matter what, try to accept that whatever you are doing now will likely change in 5 years. All around the web we can instantly see when certain sites were created, some vintage 1996, others 1999, 2002, 2007, 2011. FrontPage, GoLive, crappy web templates, straight boring html with ani-gifs.

If sticking with your previous path, Dreamweaver is probably the answer.

Re:Content Management

[LWATCDR]

Yea my wife uses it for her wordpress blog and loves it. And for $12 you are paying more for the domain name then the hosting.
If it fits you needs it is a great deal.

Re:Content Management

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Thanks for posting this. I had been so focused on a cms as the obvious solution for my own needs that it didn't even occur to me look for this type of answer - easy to maintain and eliminates significant security risks.

Re:Content Management

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Anyone have any ideas which of these packages is maintained, useful, and can reasonably be expected to be around for a while?

I used to use CityDesk from FogCreek and loved it but it's been moribund for years, even though there's still a zombie of a web site for it. I'd love to find something that won't break my heart again.

Re:Content Management

[spinkham]

Nanoc, jekyll, hyde, staticmatic, webby, and webgen all have decent install base and seem to be under development.

The nice thing about them is

1) Nanoc could not change for a long time, and it wouldn't matter to me.
2) it is easy to fix or build your own plugins for. It's a very simple program.
3) It's easy to change from one of these tools to another. For example. one of my sites I built using webby, and switched to nanoc for a few advanced features I was missing. It took me about 5 minutes ;-)

Re:Content Management

[PJ6]

That's the problem with most WSYWIG HTML editors. HTML doesn't lend itself well to WSYWIG editing...

That's the problem with standardizing at that level of abstraction. It may be fine for Joe website editor to use, but as a standard for what browsers interpret, HTML is a stupid idea.

Just learn HTML.

[Narcocide]

Seriously. You are looking for a solution to an impossible problem, and besides that it is *easier* to learn HTML than it is to learn Dreamweaver. Stop being frightened of the technicalities and just try it with a text editor for once.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[websinthe]

I agree. You'll never be able to build a properly usable site if you don't have an intermediate knowledge of the code that goes into a site. It's like trying to write a novel without learning proper grammar.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[MouseR]

I actually built a complete e-comerce web site by hand something like 13 years ago. With php scripts (or was it Perl?) and some c-based CGIs. The reason I switched to WYSIWYG is because I don't have time to deal with that and that given web site development is a far cry from my regular Application programming duties, would rather spend whatever is left of my "free" time with my kids than learning to deal with CSS.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[O('_')O_Bush]

It sounds to me like you're having to reinvent the wheel every time you change to a new tool because your WYSIWYG'er is obsolete.

Do it once and do it right, maybe you will have more time with the kids than you would dickering around with more flashy proprietary tools.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[F34nor]

The half-life of things that you don't use everyday is vanishingly short. Hell the half-life of and engineering degree is something like 3 years. Just because you happen to be able to memorize a coded system doesn't mean that the VAST majority of even technical people will. Learning styles are dramatically different, the ability for people to think that everyone should see the world the same way that they do is infinite. Also remember that a huge portion of the brain is devoted to visual processing, why rely on a system that creates an end product by cramming it down into the corpus callosum and rebuilding it on the other side of the brain. It is like employing an art director because you like his design sense then asking him to compose his images using a Litebright. WYSIWYG is fucking awesome, people who break things that work to milk customers are ass-clowns.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[Just Some Guy]

Oh, I don't know. Dreamweaver used to have a built-in VCS - it just kept adding nested tags without removing old ones. You could track the designer's thinking over time:

<i><font color="red"><font size="12"><font color="green"><b><font size="10"><em>Title</em></font></b></font></font></font></i>

It was kind of like Web 0.5 archaeology.

Re:Just learn HTML.

[MidnightBrewer]

Although nothing beats hand-written code, as far as visual editors go nothing beats Dreamweaver. Despite its obvious flaws and tendency to create bloated pages, at least it makes a good effort at scripting and coding around browser limitations so that the user typically gets a usable result. If you're not being hired to be a web coder, there's no shame in using it.

Now just try to keep it from looking ugly. ;)

Utopia Framework

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I had the same problem so I made the Utopia Framework. This is a simple tool which allows you to create website content directly. While not really ready wide adoption, I've been maintaining it (originally PHP, now Ruby) for over 10 years, and it's core ideas are (IMHO) very easy to understand and very powerful. The biggest issue right now is documentation.

Open Source CMS

[dhammond]

Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but there are many good open source CMS's that allow you to edit your website through browser based tools -- Drupal, Joomla, etc. My company has built our own CMS that allows wysiwyg editing of websites (which I won't plug). The point is, for the long haul and for a lot of reasons a browser-based solution is best. And no matter what happens to an open source project you can always continue to use the code and extend it for as long as you want.

NVU is now BlueGriffon

[roesti]

NVU and Kompozer are being replaced to some degree by BlueGriffon, which is based on the same code.

What about an open source tool?

[drdread]

I use Kompozer myself, but have had reasonable experiences with some of the other tools too. Windows, Mac, Linux...you can get Kompozer for all major platforms.

Re:What about an open source tool?

[MouseR]

Thanks for the pointer. Will check it out.

RapidWeaver

[TimHunter]

Try RapidWeaver http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/overview/. You'll probably want to use the Stacks http://yourhead.com/stacks/ plugin to get flexible page layouts and Collage http://yourhead.com/collage/ for photos.

I'm not connected to RealMac or YourHead, just a happy user.

Re:RapidWeaver

[MouseR]

So that's essentially an iWeb -style tool. Looks promising. Thanks for the pointer.

Re:RapidWeaver

[EvilIdler]

Another happy RapidWeaver user here. Hot tip: Buy the Stacks plugin too. All the stacks you can get for it cover nearly anything the average user could want. Video embedding, fancy sliding boxes of content, all sorts of jQuery tricks. If you can think of it, somebody has probably built a cheap or free stack to do it via simple drag, drop and configure.

Re:RapidWeaver

[BurntHombre]

MouseR, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Apple has not killed iWeb or made any announcements to that effect. You can still use iWeb, you just can't upload to MobileMe anymore -- you have to upload to a standard hosting service. I've been using iWeb for years and have never used MobileMe (BlueHost is who I use), so the iCloud transition does not affect me.

Re:RapidWeaver

[MouseR]

Yeah I'm aware.

Thing is, given I have to move lots of stuff out of MobileMe before June 2012, I would rather make sure that any new site content be in a format that i know will be available in the futur and can still be edited with new content. In particular, photos out of my Galleries that were linked into forum posts will have to be relinked (cringe) off my new hosting. No way I'm going to redo that from iCloud albums. Screw the cloud: I want to own my data.

So, older content from iWeb is currently being pushed onto my new hosting as-is.

New content is being put into MediaWiki and SimpleMachine.

Am still looking for a decent photo sharing solution. Tying to decide between 4images, coppermine or Gallery.

Re:RapidWeaver

[BurntHombre]

Good luck. Much as I like iWeb, it does seem to have been neglected in recent releases. I too have heard good things about RapidWeaver -- that's probably where I'd be headed if circumstances required a move.

Aptana Studio 3

[justfred]

As a PHP developer, I'm used to writing code manually rather than trying to use a GUI code creator.

Having been through several editors on several platforms, lately I like Aptana Studio 3 (version of Eclipse), mainly because of its FTP deployment, and the fact that it works identically on OSX and Windows.

(Biting tongue to avoid the troll response, Microsoft Word.)

Re:Aptana Studio 3

[i.r.id10t]

I'm in the same camp but instead of doing anything but the code writing I give a mockup of the output to the graphic design guys and they make it pretty. I then use their pretty as a template for the code to feed into.

Works much better, and looks much better too.

Re:Aptana Studio 3

[sourcerror]

Aptana is really good, it knows all the quirks of different browsers (shows compatibility info in content assist popup box).

However if you want an editor that's easily extendable, then use JEdit. Scriptable in Beanshell, has a lot of plugins, borrowed all the good stuff from emacs without the cruft. Oh, and it uses the standard Java regexp library, so you don't have to learn another regex dialect.
And plugins aren't hard to write either, you can learn how to do it in an hour or two.

MediaWiki

[davecotter]

I know the design can use some updating, and you don't have a lot of design freedom, but if your main goal is to just get information out there, update pages frequently, create new pages, and things of that nature, well i totally love MediaWiki. Your web editing tool is your web browser! I've been using it on my site since forever ( http://kjams.com/ ) and i have to say i'd never ever want to use anything else. yeah, maybe it's kindof ugly. but it's so *easy*!

Re:MediaWiki

[MouseR]

Solid contender. I actually used Wikis a lot at work as it is integrated with the set of tools we develop (collectively).

Will have to examine this further as to how I can extend it with some SQL backend DB I need to hook up.

Thanks for the Wiki reminder.

Notepad++

[Charliemopps]

Notepad++

Migrating from visual editing to hand coding.

[JoeytheSquid]

I've been a web designer since 1994. As all of my training was in the arts, not scripting or programming, I stumbled along making sites using visual editors until around 2001. At that point I realized that my various transitions from one visual editor to the next (Cyberstudio > Adobe GoLive > Dreamweaver) could be avoided if I did the proper thing and learned how to hand code HTML and CSS.

So I did. I throttled down my workload and taught myself how to hand code everything. Sure that first year was miserable but I've since put together a rapid development framework that allows me to turn a custom design to a working Wordpress theme in about a business day. The end result is less headaches, a more refined workflow and sites that actually validate.

Sure, I still rely upon an IDE for my development and most of the Mac IDEs are highly imperfect and rarely updated (Looking at you Coda, Textmate and Espresso), but at least my general workflow remains unchanged. Therefore should I need to drop Espresso and move to the (perpetually) forthcoming Coda 2, I'll be able to make that migration without much trouble.

Re:Migrating from visual editing to hand coding.

[wolfperson1]

I've been a web designer since 1994. As all of my training was in the arts, not scripting or programming, I stumbled along making sites using visual editors until around 2001. At that point I realized that my various transitions from one visual editor to the next (Cyberstudio > Adobe GoLive > Dreamweaver) could be avoided if I did the proper thing and learned how to hand code HTML and CSS.

The New York Times agrees with this approach, and they seem to have one of the better websites around: "It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21askthetimes.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Re:Migrating from visual editing to hand coding.

[JoeytheSquid]

Ironically, the New York Times is currently my biggest client. ;-)

wysiwyg Will Probably Always Have this Problem

[boondaburrah]

Unfortunately, I don't really see any way to get what you want for the long haul. Companies keep changing, and so does the web. Even if you find one, it will produce code that breaks in browsers a few years from now, and sometimes current ones. What I would suggest is (bear with me) hand-coding your layout once, and then working it as a template for a simple CMS. I wouldn't want to hand code an entire website either, and for most a fully blown CMS is overkill (I don't need forums, or accounts at all: my website isn't really social), but there exist CMSs inbetween, and you only have to hand-code a few pages at worst.

I started with WolfCMS or something similar. Make one page, cut the code into snippets, and create a "layout" that includes these snippets. The CMS will fill the content in for you as you create pages. That's all I need, and it still gives me the power/flexibility to form my website into anything I want. Also, I would avoid one that has it's own scripting language. More pain than it's worth, especially for simple websites. You'll need to learn a little web development to get set up, but it should be relatively smooth sailing once installed. Wordpress can also be bent to create a number of different kinds of websites with their template system, though it's a bit more complicated. Handy if you want to include a well-known, well-supported (with plugins!) blog system, though.

As for hand-coding software, I tend to move around. I used GoLive for a time, for the preview, but now I just have some kind of programmer's GUI text editor in one space/virtual desktop, and a browser open in the other. I use Smultron on mac (I think it's been abandoned now though), Geany on linux, and Notepad++ on windows. Geany's my favourite so far.

Re:wysiwyg Will Probably Always Have this Problem

[VortexCortex]

Though I also prefer a simple syntax highlighting/folding code editor,
I'll just say this: It is a right of passage among many Perl programmers to implement your own web templating language...
--
^-- A wise man learns from the mistakes of others... Thus, a Grammar Nazi who's re-implementing a CMS is the most wise guy.

Re:wysiwyg Will Probably Always Have this Problem

[A. Bosch]

Yeah, sadly Smultron was abandoned by its developer (or developers, but I think there was just one.) I coughed up the money for TextMate, which has some cool features.

Dreamweaver and other animals

[MishgoDog]

If you're looking for a fully visual web site editor - Dreamweaver is still a great program. There are some shortcomings, but it does a fairly good job of visual website editing, and isn't bad at colouring the html code to make code tinkering better. Using Dreamweaver is how I learnt to use html, as a start.

I use Notepad++ for most of my code tinkering though (html/js/php), so it might be worht having that on the side.

There are also a bunch of online visual web-authoring tools (through a CMS or a stand alone tool) which can be useful, but you are definitley better off with an offline editor I think!

Finally - depending on the content of your site, you can find a bunch of tools which make site design much simpler or unnecessary - e.g. wordpress for a blog, a CMS for a content driven site, Gallery for a photo gallery, etc. And with the number of skins out there, often people won't be able to tell it's not custom designed!

Re:Dreamweaver and other animals

[WillKemp]

If you're looking for a fully visual web site editor - Dreamweaver is still a great program.

Yeah, a great program for people who don't know what they're doing and want to churn out really bad html and css.

I had to clean up a lot of hideous nightmareweaver mess perpetrated by the previous incumbent in a web admin job i did for a while last year. I didn't think much of nightmareweaver before that, but i ended up totally loathing it.

Lean html and css and use geany!

Re:Dreamweaver and other animals

[WillKemp]

[......] wordpress for a blog, a CMS for a content driven site, Gallery for a photo gallery, etc

Wordpress is actually really good for all of those. It depends on exactly what you want to do, but WP is a good, full-featured CMS. I've used it for quite a few non-blog sites. It's also good for a photo gallery - just install the NextGen gallery plugin.

Emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs is the way to go! And as a matter of fact, I wrote a Lisp Script that just creates the webpage for me!

It's pretty slick. See, in my client meetings, I record what they want, I then transfer the mp3 to the machine and the script listens to it and Viola! creates the website exactly the way the customer describes it! I then get a fat check and take off in the Ferrari with my porn star of the day and we shag like Tasmanian Devils - without the cancer - Poor Devils!

At least that's what I remember after I take these cool looking pills and downing them with Scotch while viewing porn ....

Yep, DW is the choice

[nightcats]

DW is best for ease of use, convenience, durability, plugins, CSS toys, etc., etc. If you're in the Mac universe, DW is still best, but there's also a British product called Freeway which I used years ago on a PPC Mac and I think is still around. Very well done, as I remember. But if you want free, NVU is okay and I have a product on the Windows box here called HTML Kit, which is okay. But if you want the full monty in being able to work with code and design simultaneously with the assurance that the product will be on and supported five years from now, DW is your can't miss choice. It ain't cheap: $300 for the CS5.5 version; $150 if you're a student or teacher (and can prove it).

Re:Yep, DW is the choice

[WillKemp]

DW is your can't miss choice. It ain't cheap: $300 for the CS5.5 version; $150 if you're a student or teacher (and can prove it).

Forget nightmareweaver and the hideous, unmaintanable mess it churns out. You can buy a good book on html and css for a lot less than $300 and download geany for free.

Hot Dog

[thebra]

I used hot dog pro in the early 90's before I learned HTML.

Re:Hot Dog

[Saija]

Wow! i don't have hear of this program so long ago. Ahh the memories...

vi

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

vi is the one true editor. vi is the forever changing and unchanged. vi is the eternal virgin. vi is the foulest whore.

Seriously, the farther you get from twiddling text files in a text editor over SSH, the more vulnerable you are going to be to having your vendor yank the rug from under you, or just wander off and abandon you.

Sandvox

[hawkbsd]

If you're already using a Mac, you might be interested in Sandvox from Karelia Software. It does a lot of what iWeb did with some other customizations possible. You'd still have to find hosting, thought.

Sorry, but what rock have you been living under?

[Qbertino]

Sorry, but what rock have you been living under?
The number one visual web development tool for more than a decade now has been and still is Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is the reason Adobe dropped GoLive after aquiring Macromedia, since they didn't want two tools for the same segment under their roof. And it was the right decision to make Dreamweaver the prime choice.

If you need a visual web development tool, Dreamweaver is the way to go. If you're using a Mac, as I take you are, Freeway Pro and RapidWeaver are maybe alternatives.

Simple

[Ramley]

joe & bash shell

Re:Simple

[WillKemp]

joe & bash shell

Don't forget lynx!

I have the same problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like rapidweaver or sandvox is the right choice for me.
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/13/ten-ways-to-replace-iweb-and-mobileme-hosting/

I run a small that gets small updates once every month with low amount of visitors. It is just a community site for the people on the road i live on. So it is really simple since it just information on the rules, updates on our cable tv/fiber, budgets, information on board meetings.
It is really something where iweb fits and since i wasnt using my MobileMe hosting myself, i just use it for this.

BB Edit

[opencity]

hey I like it more than vi ...

Re:BB Edit

[ronhip]

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

Thanks for using a great Frank Oppenheimer quote as your sig.

Note: he was my former boss...

Re:BB Edit

[opencity]

> Thanks for using a great Frank Oppenheimer quote as your sig.

The quote's credited to Feynman. Didn't Frank Oppenheimer do the Exploratorium in SF? I went there as a kid.

BlueGriffon

[theweatherelectric]

BlueGriffon is worth a try: http://www.bluegriffon.org/

Drupal

[Plugh]

Drupal. It sucks less than the other CMS I've played with. I still hate it. Just less.

Re:Drupal

[Plugh]

I'll check out wordpress next time I need to knock together a website. I haven't looked into it in years. My beef back then was that there was no easy ability for me to customize directly. At least in Drupal I can go and write some PHP, either as a module or by editing a node, and there's plenty of introspection.

Re:Wordpress or Joomla

[Narcocide]

This is actually a good suggestion, minus the Joomla part.

Why do it yourself?

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

I just drop by the Best Buy and pick up one of those forlorn looking day-labourer devs waiting out front there.

Frontpage

[Spazmania]

Fourteen years later, I'm still using Microsoft Frontpage. They call it Sharepoint now, but it still works with the old Apache server extensions.

Re:Frontpage

[batkiwi]

The latest version of SPD barely works with apache extensions (as it's really only meant for editing sharepoint sites, hence the name change!) now.

You're likely better off switching to Blend.

Re:Frontpage

[toygeek]

And you're using outdated technology to build websites. The frontpage extensions for apache sucked major butt in 1999 and and they still do. My suggestion? Go learn how to code instead of relying on outdated crappy "technology" that was never made to work very well to begin with. And before jumping down my throat about how awesome the FP extensions are, ask yourself if you ran 100 LAMP servers first. I did. I was so happy when the FP Extensions were discontinued that I almost cried.

And as for using platform specific software/hosting to build a website, you're not a web designer, you're a program end user with a neat title. We saw a lot of those come and go at the time too. People who could develop sites with real skills actually stayed in business and had steady clientele. The Frontpage "designers" came and went once their clients realized they could do the same thing with $100 worth of software and a few hours fiddling around.

Re:Frontpage

[Spazmania]

The only thing I use them for is the ability to edit directly on the web site. For that they work just fine.

Caveat: I heavily tweaked the installation back in the day, changing how the FP extensions integrate with the server. They were terribly insecure as installed. In my install they're just a generic CGI script same as any other.

Maybe, but

[Wrexs0ul]

I'd dare say that following the garage analogy most folks here have all the best tools in it, even if a couple people may have borrowed theirs from Flanders.

-Matt

Emacs

[John Hasler]

Or vi if you are of the other religion.

Any good text editor will do.

[MpVpRb]

Some frills like color highlighting can be nice, but all you really need to edit a web page is a test editor.

CMS

[swalve]

Isn't this what a content management system is for? Pick a theme, modify, save. Done. Shouldn't ever have to touch code after you have gotten the template right.

Wow... no Aptana loving?

[Ophbalance]

I'm amazed that in 75 posts, Aptana is mentioned once? They're not pushing hard enough into the market ;). I really enjoy Eclipse because:

• My sites are stored in subversion... use subclipse for that
• My sites are also stored in ftp... use Aptana for that
• I'm looking to branch into android... use the Android SDK plugin
• Use jQuery and other JS tools... there's a plugin for that

• So far, the only thing that Aptana really fails me at is UI design when coding CFML templates. That's the only reason I haul out Dreamweaver anymore. And even that's a rare day as most of my time is spent cutting up templates for CMS integration. Someone else has already done the Photoshop/Illustrator -> HTML work before me.

Re:Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CS

[CODiNE]

Do you know if the iWeb/MobileMe visitor counter thing will work? Is that something supported by the server and my counts will reset or is it just a text file counter I can copy over to a new host?

Since you use iWeb and know about web standards.

Anacrophila??

[willy_me]

I tried to do a google search regarding this term.... The only link that Google provided was this post!!! I assume it was a typo? Care to fix it?

Re:Anacrophila??

[khendron]

I assume he meant Arachnophilia.

No, I hadn't heard of it before either. I just Googled harder.

Re:Anacrophila??

[sharkey]

Google also brought back "Did you mean: Necrophilia", which I don't think has much to do with HTML editing.

Re:Anacrophila??

[Tumbleweed]

Google also brought back "Did you mean: Necrophilia", which I don't think has much to do with HTML editing.

No, *that* has to do with IE, cuz that thing is fucking *dead*.

Management of Adobe?

[Futurepower(R)]

That raises a bigger question: What has happened to the management of Adobe? There are many, many examples of bad management there, in my opinion. It seems that Adobe needs a new CEO.

There are new versions that don't fix old bugs and insufficiencies, but cost a lot. Sometimes when you buy a CD of Creative Suite, you get software on the CD that is many months old, and requires downloading the newest version.

CMS + CSSEdit

[jeffgtr]

In the end you are going to have to do a little code. For visual editing like others have said Dreamweaver is probably the best, and it's not bad for hand coding..it's just bloated. I do have a suggestion not mentioned here, try using wordpress and use CSSEdit to style the site. You will have to manually do some css coding however you will get instant feedback visually. If you learn to at least code css you will find you have much more control and arrive at the layout you want much easier. Now that IE6 is moving off the radar the bar to entry is much lower. The thing is, if you want something for the long haul learn at least html and css then you can use vi it's been around since 1978, it's free and it's really powerful and not going anywhere anytime soon. On the mac Textmate and Coda are excellent editors, but again, not exactly visual. GoLive was a wretched piece of software imho, if you suffered through that you can suffer through anything.

Re:NVU is now BlueGriffon but is not Kompozer

[NemoinSpace]

Kompozer css editor is still free, so it is only being replaced to the degree that you are willing to abandon free software and use a comparatively horrible license like your CSS Pro Editor imposes.
I still do most of my direct editing in Seamonkey's composer and switch to Notepad++ when things get large. IDE's for me are more trouble than they are worth. (although it occurs to me my website rerflects that)

WYSWIG Editors are not sustainable

[Aloisius]

Web technologies change rapidly enough that any GUI editor you use today is going to generate code that will be considered sub-par in a few years. Heck, they generate code that is considered sub-par *now*.

That said, you probably are going to revamp the look and feel of your website every few years anyway, so why worry about the long haul? Get the best tool for the job right now and upgrade later.

Dreamweaver

[patchouly]

I've been using "Dreamweaver" for years. Fantastic product and well worth the investment.

CKEditor plus your favorite CMS

[Chemtox]

CKEditor plus your favorite CMS. For me that would be Drupal, but I wold recommend WordPress (another demo) if you don't intend to develop on it.

On the desktop, I recall Dream Weaver producing dirty code, though that may have changed. I wouldn't bet on that for SharePoint though. I preferred HotDog and Composer --which are still ghosting around-- before switching full time to Emacs. In short, native apps are dead, and you could as well use LibreOffice. Its tag-fu is oke'ish. Now get off ma cloud!

Re:CKEditor plus your favorite CMS

[WillKemp]

[......] I wold recommend WordPress (another demo) if you don't intend to develop on it.

Developing with Wordpress is at least as easy as it is with Drupal. Writing plugins is simple and the Wordpress Codex has a vast amount of good documentation.

for the long haul...

[roc97007]

... the really long haul, I use vi. (pronounced Vee-Eye) I used it for the first web page I ever wrote in the early nineties, and I used it last night to make changes in a website I currently support. It has never let me down.

Feel free to substitute the text editor of your choice. I have a lot of experience in vi so I tend to use that. I have Dreamweaver cs3 but found myself going back to vi for quick changes and eventually abandoned Dreamweaver as a solution looking for a problem. My bookshelf contains something called "web edit pro", the Coffee Cup suite, Frontpage (retch!), and a couple others, but eventually I would find myself using a text editor again. It's like the guy who tried a whole bunch of different kinds of contact lenses and just tossed it all in favor of glasses. It's simple and gets the job done.

Now, a content management system, where the meat is already written for you and all you have to do is skin it, is a different question. I use an open-source CMS for some of my websites, but I still use vi to skin it.

Re:Maqetta

[perryizgr8]

seriously doesn't work.

Re:Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CS

[TaoPhoenix]

I'll agree to this.

My page is kinda sloppy only 'cause I decided Good Enough was good enough. But I had an instinct the overlaid crap like Flash was gonna die.

Look at Daring Fireball. Gotta be easy to code - it's simply 60 (whatever) characters of news. The Mobile Revolution trashed the Fancy paradigm.

I'm def. a hobbyist but I trust Notepad as my go-to to save versions as text and then the Loadable copy as html.

Arachnophilia

[Futurepower(R)]

Is this what you mean?

Arachnophilia

Content Management+CSS editing

[Ken_g6]

Based on "would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it", I agree with the parent's suggestion. Drupal comes to mind too.

If you want your site to look a little more original than what a CMS offers by itself, all you need to do is edit the CSS. To do that, I suggest Firefox, Stylish, and It's All Text to give you a nice editing environment (e.g. Vim). Put together, they let you change any or all of your CSS and see results with a single click (well, two clicks if you use It's All Text).

iWeb + Self Host

[mla_anderson]

I set my wife up with iWeb using ExpanDrive to mount the server via SSHFS. Then she just publishes to what iWeb thinks is a local folder. Works so great and easy the kids are all doing their own sites to.

Re:iWeb + Self Host

[mla_anderson]

Meant to advertise for my host...no one beats Linode.com...and no I am not paid to say that.

Dreamweaver

[Count Fenring]

If you want to go with something WYSIWYG with some chance of being around in five/ten years, I think Dreamweaver is probably your best bet.

Spend the money and get Dreamweaver

[wardk]

you won't need to buy it ever again, the version you get will do everything you need, forever.

you can let it do the work, this gaining the wrath of the pure, or you can just code up the html with your bare hands.

the preview is nice, the fact it pulls up related pages for edit (.css files, etc) is useful and it will manage your site tree and ftp for you as well.

pricey, but a good product that isn't going away.

Vi, Vim are great too. but that doesn't sound like what you are looking for.

Dreamweaver 10 Year Veteran Here...

[beadfulthings]

If you need a visual editor, don't fool around with anything but Dreamweaver. It hasn't changed substantively since 2002. I have a 2002 version still running on an older Mac, and a brand new CS5 version running on a brand new Mac, and both are essentially the same, with the new version having enough convenient updates to keep up with the times (css versus the old table layouts, for example). Dreamweaver and Photoshop are the two programs that Adobe hasn't managed to screw up over the years. (I have a nine year old Photoshop running on the old machine as well.) You can freely pass up the entire remainder of their Creative Suite. If the last Adobe product you used was GoLive, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

If you don't require a visual editor, TextWrangler for the Mac is a nice text editor, laden with bells, whistles, and conveniences. It is a newer incarnation of the old bbEdit. I am utterly clueless as to what is out there for Windows.

As much as we all find it necessary to pay our due and fitting homage to free and open source software, there is nothing out there that can do what these two applications do without a lot of blood, toil, sweat, and tears. I don't have a lot of time to bleed, perspire, and cry--I'd rather just work comfortably.

Re:Dreamweaver 10 Year Veteran Here...

[mrxak]

It's more accurate to call it a newer incarnation of BBEdit Lite, but I'll gladly second TextWrangler as a recommendation. I used to use BBEdit Lite way back in the day, and I've used TextWrangler ever since it came out. It's got a lot of advanced features, but mainly it gets out of your way and lets you do your thing until you need them.

BBEdit is still around too, if you want to pay for TextWrangler's "older brother".

From the information given in the question, it sounds to me that TextWrangler would be the better choice of the two, but check out the feature comparison. Well, TextWrangler is free, so you can always try that out for a while first anyway.

Neither program is a WYSIWYG but stuff like HTML and CSS aren't that hard to learn, and you may find it beneficial in the long run to learn how to do things by hand. Both tools will give you all the handy syntax coloring and search tools you could ever need, and they are really great web IDEs.

VIM (or any other text editor)

[gullevek]

I never relied on any special editor. As long at it has code word highlight I am fine. VIM (or any other text editor) will not go away. And if you stick with oldschool workhorses like VIM (or EMACS, or whatever) you can be pretty sure your web pages will be the same forever.

Re:VIM (or any other text editor)

[diego.viola]

+1 for Vim.

Re:bad html

[TaoPhoenix]

Oh dear gawd yes!

I'll live with my simple designs I understand!

I quake in terror at

(font=courier H) (Font=Arial i. How are you.(/Arial) (/Courier) (/Font) (Nbsp)vNbsp) (Nbsp) (Nbsp) (Nbsp) (Nbsp) (Nbsp) (Nbsp)

Another vote for Komposer/BlueGriffon

[stargazer1sd]

I've been using NVU/Komposer/BlueGriffon for more than 10 years. It isn't perfect, but it's usually good enough. Now days, I mostly use Drupal, but when I need a simple static page, I'm back to BlueGriffon.

That said, if you need something more complicated, think about using a web content management system. It takes some learning, but I can now set up a basic Drupal site in less than a day, on a managed host.

Re:Another vote for Komposer/BlueGriffon

[Bing Tsher E]

Believe it or not,when the Mozilla project decided to kill the Mozilla suite (browser email newsreader and composer all in one piece) some developers decided to continue it on. The project is called Seamonkey and its the browser of choice for many of us. I add this comment on to the parent because the code that was split off when Firefox happened is NVU. But the composer component of Seamonkey, while somewhat plain, is a fairly decent WYSIWYG html editor. Also,it has a seamless drag and drop capability with the browser component which is nice for grabbing images from anywhere else on the web to your own page.

Alse, because the browser and composer are so tightly integrated,you can just pick 'edit'from any browser window and it pulls the page you are viewing into a composer window.

Seamonkey is,of course an open source pzrt of the Mozilla project that you can download for free.

Re:Sorry, but what rock have you been living under

[WillKemp]

Not ideal with dynamic content or frameworks though.

Nightmareweaver isn't ideal for anything other than use by bodgy amateurs who don't know or care that it churns out really bad html and css - plus totally unnecessary javascript.

Re:Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CS

[betterunixthanunix]

TeX

This is not a text editor.

For data-driven design, though...why code?

[Nefarious Wheel]

All the above notes seem to focus on the cosmetic aspects of the design. MouseR, are you putting together an attractive static site, or are you trying to expose a view of a database to the world? If the latter, I've had good luck with IronSpeed this past year, put together a couple of dozen sites with it.

I'm a DBA, not a web designer, so cosmetics take second place behind functionality. IronSpeed Designer has its quirks, but I've not found a faster way to get a few tables up and running on our intranet. It's basically an ASPX code generator, and it's all Microsofty, but the guys behind the product were the Amazon.com web designers and it just sort of works. V7.0.1 seems to work better than V8.0 though, so see if you can get that version first. Costs about $2k per named developer iirc.

Re:For data-driven design, though...why code?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Oh and if you need an editor, TextPad is pretty good. Macros work way better than Notepad++.

Identifying OP's Target

[Rie Beam]

I'm a little confused -- are you looking for an online CMS? Or an offline tool for editing? Because that seems to be more than half of the recommendations coming up.

If you're looking for content management, your options are pretty much limited to how much power you ultimately want over your content. Drupal has a little bit of a learning curve but is easily the most flexible options in the pack; outside of that, try browsing a couple of distribution sites, or hell:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

Of course, when it comes down to it, just simply learning to hand-code is not going to be the end of the world, I promise. Nothing has changed in the time you've described on the code-side of things except for bolted-on additions, and browsers are still pretty forgiving to older code (programmers could only wish for the kinds of backwards-compatibility HTML has had during its existence). HTML is not that difficult. CSS is not that difficult. AJAX might be a bit of a push, but JQuery is pretty solid for adding a little extra "zing" for not a lot of extra work. Look into it:

http://www.w3schools.com/

Website editing software?

[Mystery00]

I use Netbeans just for the nice PHP/HTML/CSS syntax highlighting.

Stay with iWeb, upload to your server using FTP

[smurfsurf]

If your are content with iWeb, stay with it. IWeb is not bound to MobileMe, it can just as well publish to your own FTP server. See http://www.apple.com/findouthow/web/ or http://macintoshhowto.com/software/how-to-upload-iweb-sites-without-a-mac-account-iweb-09.html

Re:Stay with iWeb, upload to your server using FTP

[MouseR]

Yeah, I know. Was already using iWeb for a couple of other web stores via FTP.

I actually, last night, tested installation of a couple of solutions and moved *some* of my iWeb content to the new hosting. I will ultimately recode that to use SQL DB.

I moved some content into a new MediaWiki and installed SimpleMachine forum on there as well.

Still looking for a decent visual editor for the fluff stuff. But I will start to bring things down to a closer level to hand-coded. I just don't have the cash for DreamWeaver (certainly not worth it for this project) nor do I have much confidence in other tools.

The biggest tool was myself for trusting that Apple could actually be considered serious about any of its online services. They can go fsck themselves with iClouds. No way I`m pushing my data out of my reach.

Cold Fusion Studio?

[joshuao3]

I've been using Cold Fusion Studio 5 for over 10 years and love it. I don't care for visual editors and am versed in all the underlying syntaxes that I use. It has intelligent highlighting, tag insight/completion, FTP integration, and most importantly RDS integration (for direct file manipulation as well as database schema viewing/querying). I am hesitant to update to Windows 7 since I lost the install files due to a hard drive crash, or else I could see using it for the next 5 years or more. It's a very solid editor, despite a few minor quirks. Notepad++ would likely be my next platform of choice if I lose my current install.... if only it supported RDS I'd switch now, to be fair.

Drupal

[jabberw0k]

I use, and have written a few plugins for, WordPress... Drupal sounds like a horrible disease.

Your goal is wrong

[Dystopian Rebel]

The number of software fatalities in the area of Web development is caused by the rapidly changing standards. You need to learn how to do things directly and simply with whichever stable tools suit you.

I like Notepad++ but have also had a good experience with NoteTab (Free and Pro). The latter has a powerful macro language.

http://www.notetab.com/

Re:A real answer from a full time professional

[JSBiff]

That Bluefish looks pretty cool. I've often wished for something similar (I just went and watched the little intro video).

There's some few things where a GUI approach can be really nice - like picking colors, for example, in certain cases. Does Bluefish offer a gui color picker, then when you pick the color, it inserts the hexcode or rgb(x, y, z) into the code for you?

Also, if you happen to need to create a static table with some data, it's kind of nice to be able to use a gui for creating all the rows and columns (sure, you can do it in the text editor, but it's a pain to create all the tr and td elements, and make sure you have the right number in each row, etc). If you want to delete a column, that's always a P.I.T.A. Does bluefish provide any method of making table creation/maintenance easier?

Google Sites

[milimetric]

sites.google.com

you get hosting and editing all on the web. it's super easy and most likely will always be up.

Google Sites

[GuyRiley]

If you were comfortable managing things with iWeb, why not check out Google Sites? It's basically the same thing, only in the Google universe instead of the Apple one, and it's free. You can choose from a ton of pre-built templates just like iWeb, or you can code your own pages if you ever decide you would like to do that. It's pretty widely used so I think it's extremely unlikely that Google will discontinue support for it anytime in the forseeable future.

iWeb 11 can publish via FTP to any host

[webagogue]

If iWeb works for you, why stop using it? iWeb 11 can publish via FTP to any host. .Mac come MobileMe (come iCloud?) is not required.

gotta love this

[SilverBlade2k]

This guy asked for a web site editor, and also says 'Notepad isn't a good replacement'...and everyone suggests about 500 other text editors. I don't think this guy wants a text editor, otherwise he would have asked for a text editor..

pfs:Write

[Osgeld]

forever!

give XMetaL a try

[Zinho]

Back in my younger days as a web developer I swore by the HoT MetaL editor for developing web pages. It allowed me to view and develop my web page in WYSIWYG style, raw HTML, or an intermediate "view tags" mode that was a hybrid of both. It gave closer control over the code than dreamweaver and produced higher quality code than frontpage. I felt like it gave me the flexibility of a notepad-like text editor while leveraging some of the power and ease-of-use of a graphical editor. Unfortunately, the company that made it got bought out and the product got shelved.

I hear that there's a replacement-in-spirit available, though, in the form of XMetaL. It's designed as an XML editor, but if you restricted it to the HTML DTD it may be a useful web editor. I haven't tried it, though, so YMMV.

Good luck with your search!

AOLpress

[robogun]

I've been using this for about 15 years. You get a WYSIWYG and a HTML text editor. It's 16 bit windows and fits on two floppies. It's decent for basic sites and is free if you can find it - but it was last updated in 1997.

The main drawback is lack of javascript support in the WYSIWYG but you can insert your scripts with the HTML editor and test in current browsers.

Code it yourself or use a text editor

[dn15]

If it's a relatively static site where you need fine-tuned control over design and layout, write it yourself in a text editor. If it's frequently changing, or has multiple contributors, set up a CMS such as WordPress. Select or create a good theme, then "set it and forget it."

Online CMS

[ski_tuning_tools]

I am no coder and have been reliant on CMS systems since putting my first store online over 10 years ago with Front Page. Over the years I have used WordPress, Joomla and found them to be progressing nicely. The issue I have with them is that you need to keep patching them and looking for new plugins. I have in the past few years started to use squarespace more and more due to the all in one place approach. I think v6 will be great when it comes out later this year. (High hopes anyway)

Kompozer.

[crhylove]

Used to be called Nvu, but I've been using it for years to great success. It's basic, kind of a shitty dreamweaver, but it's free, open source, and has been totally acceptable as my basic html editor (along with Gimp) for nearly 10 years (under various names and guises).

Cheap, easy, been around

[solune]

SJNamo makes a program called "Web Editor". Admittedly not the best, most polished, but no slouch either. they just updated to version 9, and it's still pretty cheap compared to professional ones. There's a working demo available, so you might find it's more flexible and useful than me....I'm pretty much an amateur at website building. Hope it helps.

edlin

[NicknamesAreStupid]

It is like playing chess without the board . . . or the pieces.

Maybe get a job...

[peterofoz]

Perhaps, get a job building web site editing software. It seems to be a never ending source of new challenges.

--- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

vi or die

[northernfrights]

cmon I know you're still out there...

LISP or Erlang?

[meburke]

If you are just looking for a design environment, then Dreamweaver is probably as good as any.

If you are looking for real power and scalability in website design, try LISP or Erlang. Those will keep your brain cells sparking!

Yet Another Website Creation Tool

[xmundt]

Greetings and Salutations...
          I want to draw attention to the suite of programs by sausage.com out of Australia. I used to use their HotDog editor and, found it a really good tool for moderately sized websites. I liked it well enough that I actually paid the $100 license fee (which, at the time, was a pretty good chunk of change). They were very good with customer support, too, as I had a couple of questions that ended up being answered by one of the developers. It is still around, and, they have continued to add tools that can be integrated into the basic editor to extend its capabilities. I would still likely use it if I were pumping out websites still.
            regards
          dave

BlueGriffon

[wynand1004]

I just started using BlueGriffon, a free and open source WYSIWYG web editor that is available for Linux, Windows, and MacOSX.

It's lineage is as follows:

Netscape Composer -> NVU -> Kompozer -> Blue Griffon

It's been around in one form or another since 1997, so I'm thinking it won't go anywhere.

Firebug

[Billly Gates]

If you are fairly competent in knowing html tags then an editor is trivial. However, knowing what your CSS will look like is a different matter.

I dislike Dreamweaver, but like Word it is the defacto standard since FrontPage isn't around anymore. Use that and Firebug and an editor of your choosing. I use Aptana with eclipse personally, but it is quite bloated.

Re:Firebug

[Lillebo]

Dreamweaver, but like Word it is the defacto standard since FrontPage isn't around anymore

The defacto standard!?! Stop pulling this crap out of your ass. Not a single web developer I know uses that retarded IDE - and I've been in the biz for the last 5 years.

Netbeans, Eclipse or TextMate.

Re:Firebug

[Shados]

A whole FIVE YEARS?! WOW! So you've seen 0.001% of the industry, huh?

Re:Firebug

[Miamicanes]

AFAIK, if you're doing development involving Java tag libraries and designers who aren't directly involved with the development of those taglibs, there's exactly one application that can deal with them nicely: Dreamweaver. With Dreamweaver, the taglib developer can create renderers for Dreamweaver that will allow the designer to use them interactively and seamlessly. Dreamweaver allows you to thunk and fake dynamic content so those designers can deal with it as though it were a native part of HTML/CSS itself. Of course, the consequence is that the developer will end up spending twice as much time creating the renderers for Dreamweaver, and there's no guarantee that the output of the renderers will actually be in sync with reality, but in the grand scheme of things, if what you want is a seamless partnership between a creative designer who's not necessarily a programmer, and J2EE developer who's not necessarily a designer, and enable them to work as a team without constantly stepping on each other's feet, there's basically one choice: Dreamweaver. With custom extensions and a really fast PC, it can do incredible things. The main problems are the fact that it's ungodly expensive, and the partnership I just described requires programming talent that few organizations are likely to have (you aren't going to hire someone just out of college, or a consultant from India, to cheaply implement that kind of development environment).

Re:Firebug

[Billly Gates]

Go look at the want ads? They all advertise Dreamweaver experience as part of the minimum requirement for the jobs where I live in Alaska. I do not like it, but netbeans does not offer a CSS layout preview. Aptana I mentioned is a an Eclipse addon and it has no gui tools too.

Many developers use Dreamweaver because they are Adobe photoshop and Live shops and it is part of Adobe's ecosystem so it comes with the expensive bundle so it is what the graphical design teams use. I find it frustrating, but more gui and graphical oriented professionals prefer it.

vi

[drolli]

under no circumstances *emacs*

(ok, ok it was just an attempt to get a flamewar going)

Alton Brown

[glodime]

As much as I like Alton Browns ability to explain cooking and inventive ways of simplification. He contradicts himself often, particularly when he finds a "unitasker" he likes.

huh?

[Hognoxious]

It seems we can't rely on software, in particular Web site editing software, to exist for the long haul. Every time I rely on something, it takes only a couple of years before it gets trashed.

Did you lose the discs? Or does someone point a gun at you until you upgrade?

Re:huh?

[MouseR]

No. Steve Jobs yanked the services out of reach. Happened with iTools, Dot mac groups and HomePage, iWeb & MobileMe.

Sure MobileMe will remain available until June 2012, but it doesn't change the fact that I have THOUSANDS of MobileMe Gallery -hosted images linked in hundreds of forum posts all over the next. I will have to relink those images.

So yeah: call that a gun to my head.

Re:huh?

[Hognoxious]

I have no idea what any of that stuff is, but MobileMe would appear to be a some kind of image hosting service. That's not the same thing as editing software, which was the subject of the question.

See, this is where all this cloud bullshit fails. You may legally and morally own your data, but as the old proverb goes possession is 9/10 of the law. And for data, possession amounts to being the gatekeeper that decides how (and all Kipling's other words) it can be accessed. You have fallen for data lock-in.

Ditch the crutch

[RandomStr]

Ditch the crutch and learn HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Personally, I use Context among other... It's not the most complete and it could use a win 7 overall, but its got tabs, code hi-lighting and it's much more streamlined compared to notepad++.

And use Firebug... WYSIWYG in an editor is pointless when your delivery medium is a web browser, its not the same thing...

The only correct answer

[Lillebo]

Dear OP.

What you are after is a so-called "WYSIWYG" editor. This acronym stands for "What You See Is What You Get" - but is falsely misleading. I work as a web developer, and every single WYSIWYG editor I've ever seen is pure shit. Yes, this includes Dreamweaver and its amazing preview function. What you see is definitely not what you get.

The rendering of web pages are completely dependent on the web browser. For the browser to display the website correctly, the code must comply with certain standards and best practices. The problem being that there are so many different web browsers. And even though we hate to admit it, Internet Explorer 6 still has around 10-20% market share. FYI; IE6 is notoriously difficult to engineer content for.

Trust me on the following: if you don't care wether or not your website can be rendered in all major web browsers - your content can't be all too important either. The internet is full of worthless shit and if your goal is to just slap some more crap onto the intertubes, then - well you shouldn't. If your goal is to publish something of value for the public to read - then take the time to either a) learn what it takes to code web pages correctly, or b) hire someone to do it for you.

Don't use WYSIWYG editors. Stop being lazy. Get off my tubes.

ikiwiki

[RichiH]

Yes, it looks scary. But it's there for the long haul, it's lightweight, it generates (mostly) static HTML.

You can use any VCS as back-end with git being the default. You can use half a dozen markup languages to generate the HTML from or just write plain HTML.

tl;dr: Try ikiwiki. If you make it out alive, you will love it.

Architecture

[Archtech]

Not enough people ask questions like this, so I'd like to congratulate MouseR for raising the whole issue. When you start a project, all too often "architecture" is understood to mean the design (look and feel) and perhaps what underlying software frameworks and servers you'll use. It's very easy to overlook the fact that development tools are mostly shifting sands - not ideal for building your imperishable monument on top of.

For a start, please note that "classic" HTML is pretty austere. It doesn't really cater for visual design at all, partly because the wise decision was taken to focus on communicating information, and let the client tweak the look-and-feel to his own desires and needs. Thus, the same page of HTML could look entirely different to someone with very short sight, who might choose to make everything look a lot bigger. That philosophy didn't sit well with the commercial brigade who presently set out to extract mountains of money from the Web - nor with artists and all sorts of other folk who want to achieve specific visual effects. But the very simplest way of making sure your Web content remains immune to bitrot is to stick to the simplest possible look-and-feel, which in turn allows you to adopt the very simplest (and thus cheapest and most lasting) toolset.

Dreamweaver

[AVryhof]

Of all of the web editing products I have used throughout the years, Dreamweaver has had staying power.

I learned HTML way back when by fiddling with it in Netscape composer in WYSIWYG Mode and seeing what it produced, then reading docs and writing my own code.... then I wanted to do some more advanced stuff, so I switched to doing everything in Notepad, and eventually FrontPage 2003 because it was included with MS Office. (not anymore...imagine that)

When my company wanted to start making it so everyone could do web editing, we had to find a Window/Mac compatible program, there was GoLive and Dreamweaver. Adobe had already bought Macromedia so we could see GoLive being killed soon, and as much as I love Open Source, NVU/Kompozer/BlueGriffon/Seamonkey just aren't a choice because they screw up my hand-coded stuff, and Aptana often gets in the way of how I work. (I could probably get used to it if I used it for a few years) Quanta looked promising until it stopped being developed (Kate is OK), Bluefish is OK too, but it still feels more like a text editor than an HTML editor.

Even if you never touch Design mode, Dreamweaver does it right. Tag hinting, Auto-closing when you type / (though it would be nice if it highlighted matching braces and tags like PSPad does) TopStyle's CSS hinting, the ability to expand the tag library, DOM Hinting in JavaScript, an expandable/organized code snippet library, flexible templates, the ability to make a website editable with Contribute (which is handy for when non-technical types have to be able to update the site without screwing up the design) and everything a great Web development IDE should have, as well as the WYSIWYG editor.

At work, we have CS3, and are trying to get the board to move up to CS5 (more for our design staff), but here at home, I use Macromedia Studio 8. It installs and works perfectly under WINE, and with how I work (mostly in code, with some visits to design view), it works fine for coding HTML5. The only things I really miss from newer versions of Dreamweaver are things like built in CVS Support and improved testing/production server support.

Worry less about the IDE and more about the system

[jvin248]

Learn to build a LAMP server with Ubuntu or Debian and host the website yourself.

Install Wordpress and grab a theme you kind of like, modify the things you don't. There are a lot of free themes out there. You can make a more traditional website instead of a weblog (use 'pages' instead of 'posts').

Use Scribefire to edit the site, upload pictures and videos.

I run the above stack, on an old Pentium-2 machine or on a Virtual Machine. Granted the 'Slashdot effect' could bring those servers down... but it doesn't appear you're trying to find an IDE to create massive corporate web installations with fail-over and load-balancing and so on.

.The key with most sites ends up being the general color scheme, fonts, and graphics/pictures. That is what the end user sees and gets a strong opinion about. then it's if the site is easy to navigate, good content, etc. that they stay.

For raw site editors ... Kompozer, Gedit, Kate, Bluefish, Quanta Plus.

o

CSS + template toolkit + markdown

[ResidentSourcerer]

This is not a visual system, but it is very very fast at creating content.

Markdown is a simplified environment for writing that avoids most of the tags and their associated visual clutter, leaving a visual ascii representation similar to email and usenet.

# This is an H1 headline.

## This is an H2 headline

* An unordered list element.
* Another list element
              * Nested list element

[Text to show as a link](web reference)

You get the drift.

You can't do complicated stuff directly, but most of the time you don't need to.

Template Toolkit allows you to build frames to dump the markdown into.

While a bit clunky, it has enough logic in it to build a menu system from a directory structure.

Layout is done entirely with CSS.

The effect of this is almost complete separation of design from content.

The latest version of MD is MultiMarkdown 3, which in addition to creating HTML has options for creating PDF, LaTeX. Which means taht if you design it properly, you can have one set of easily editable source documents that can provide both web pages and print ready, page numbered manuals.

It's not a complete system. Layout is still a matter of much tweaking of the CSS file, and reloading. Scripts are as ugly as ever.

Re:Dreamweaver vs Homesite

[Sczi]

Homesite still is homesite. I prefer it a million times over any dreamweaver. Unfortunately, it's showing its age a bit and has a few annoyances. But I don't do wysiwyg. I also wouldn't recommend it to anyone not at least semi-invested in ColdFusion so you can single step and break point and whatnot. It is very good for coding html by hand, though.

Notepad++

[unity100]

It will satisfy all your needs, and more, with plugins. its there to stay.

second

[unity100]

what he said

Re:Sorry, but what rock have you been living under

[jafiwam]

I always smile when you youngsters show up and complain about how bad things are. ;)

DreamWeaver was leaps and bounds (even version 2) ahead of anything out there.

For the most part, it STILL IS. The new versions of DW have stepped away from using JavaScript for everything, but then again, "behaviors" and menus should not be something done by a WYSIWYG editor.

Granted the problems with the HTML remain, however if you haven't cleaned up FrontPage2000 code maintained by Oldie McHRmanager recently you should stop whining. I am pretty sure, that even when FP2003 came out Microsoft clearly didn't have any idea what CSS was.

DreamWeaver is a great tool if it's used properly. Some features should be simply not used. Start in the code screen and go from there. That's all you have to do. Switch to the "Design" screen for content markup but make changes to any components in the code. Use whatever includes are possible, and use DW to make sample CSS and then copy it into your actual CSS file it works great.

DoodleKit

[ArhcAngel]

All the comments seem to be steering you towards text editors which are great for the pro and serious hobbyist but if you are looking for true WYSIWYG DoodleKit is probably more of what you are looking for. I'll probably get flamed for even suggesting such a simple, platform independent, powerful tool that requires no coding and that is fine. Everything is done in your browser so you can edit your web site no matter where you are or what type of machine you are working on.

bleeding edge is not for you

[Skapare]

If you want bleeding edge GUI features and wrist cracking hand holding, then you are going to have to learn to keep moving along with the changes.

If you want solid, stable, time tested tools, see what's been around for 10 or 20 years and still kicking. Hint: that really is notepad, vi, and emacs (and minor clones). They made HTML, CSS, and Javascript in ASCII text for a reason.

Now, I just wish there was an option to fire up emacs for Slashdot posts.

*Ducks* Dreamweaver?

[alta]

I hate to say this, but it's not a bad program (compared to frontpage) and lord has it been around for a long time. I first used Dreamweaver 2.

If long haul, you mean by, it lasts a long time, I think it fits the bill. Version 1 came out in 97 We're at 11.5 right now, so yeah, I'd say we're pretty much at long haul status here.

And yeah, the gui has been modified a lot in 14 years, but the concept is the same.

Re:*Ducks* Dreamweaver?

[alta]

Oh, yeah, and now that I've posted this, I'm sure tomorrow you'll read that dreamweaver has been canned by adobe.

WS Editing Software

[Roaddog156]

I've used WebStudio from Back to the Beach Software for YEARS. 'Like it jus' fine. Cheers! RD

Re:What the....?

[IpalindromeI]

It isn't sarcasm. It's a typo that happens to spell another word, so the little squiggly red lines don't appear to let people know they made a misspelling. Also, hardly anyone here bothers to proof-read their posts, as is clear from the common requests for an "edit" button.

So, it's basically down to laziness.

Re:Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CS

[fusiongyro]

You should get rid of your visitor counter and use Google Analytics. Your visitors don't care what visitor number they are, and you can get much better analytics for free without screwing your usability.

Try EZGenerator

[SkipStein]

Well, I scanned and even did a page search so I wouldn't miss another posting, but didn't see a mention for EZGenerator (http://wholefoods4healthyliving.com/documents/ezgenerator4.html). This is surprising for a number of reasons. First of which it is the most powerful and easy to use product I found. Some years ago I also was frustrated when Front Page and some other web design tools died off. It is not only a pain in the but to re-do many sites (I host 15 or so - on IXWebhosting) but terribly time consuming. EZGenerator has SO many tools for the real web developer I won't go there as I am one to follow the KISS principle. As I have used it and gotten more comfortable I have experimented with more advanced features. Anyway, the support is pretty good and there are tweaks with frequent updates (automatic). The support forums are pretty good as well. The tutorials are great but can be a bit sparse when you are trying to do something specific. Overall it is a really great tool. Oh, and the templates are really great, numerous. You can change the entire look and feel of a site in just a few seconds by just using a different template. I haven't yet found a case where this broke any functionality. Pretty cool. Anyway, just my thoughts. When you find a really good/great product, you want to give them credit and help the sales a bit! Cheers

real websites use content management systems

[datapharmer]

First, use a cms. You are killing me inside using tools that are essentially 90s technology. Second, edit the cms templates (on a mac) with smultron or if you prefer use Coda. On windows use notepad++

Artisteer, Drupal 7, and a little knowledge of...

[herojig]

PHP. What else do you need? But any CMS will do. Coding individual HTML pages in Dreamweaver of anything else seems pretty much "olden days" to me.

It's not dead yet!

[jht]

For starters, iWeb can still develop sites that will work fine and FTP upload to your web host of choice. Next issue - MobileMe hosting isn't offline yet, and won't be until at least next June. That assumes, of course, that Apple doesn't come up with any migration path to iCloud-based hosting (or preserve MobileMe hosting as an option).

The only things we know for sure right now are that all the traditional MobileMe services (mail, contacts, calendars, file sync) will be provided by iCloud this fall. Other details are yet to be known. Apple has a habit in recent years of pre-announcing the doom of a product (see Xserve) before there's a public replacement announced, which drives us all nuts but usually works out OK in the end.

If you go away from iWeb, though, there are some good editors with similar feature sets and long histories out there in the Mac world. Freeway, Sandvox, and RapidWeaver are all supported products at fairly low prices. But if I was a betting man, I'd bet that MobileMe hosting will ultimately be preserved in some form.

TECO

[BrokenHalo]

Oh dear. You have all got it completely wrong. There is only One True editor, and His name is Allah^W^W^W^W (oops, turned over two pages at once) that is TECO, for which Emacs was originally a set of macros. TECO is heavy on meatspace memory usage, but it is still by far the fastest and IMO best text editor on the planet.

And given that it is just about the same age as I am (approaching 50 terrestrial years), it definitely qualifies as being here for the long haul.

Re:What the....?

[BrokenHalo]

Also, hardly anyone here bothers to proof-read their posts...

Or more likely, they suffer from the Mispeling Vyrus. [A virtual beer to enlightened souls who spot the reference...]

...or you could write your own

[holophrastic]

if you don't like depending on other people's business models for your own, you could, oh I don't know, build your own business model. quit complaining about what other people do, and do it yourself.

I've built my entire IDE out of ultraedit (a shmancy text editor), an interesting FTP configuration, an intriquing linux setup, and my own platform that flexes all three with a mysql adaptation to provide exatly what I want, in a way that will never be changed behind my back.

These are not the droids you are looking for..

[SuperCharlie]

Here is the real "problem".. you get a wyswyg editor and wyswyg yourself to happiness.. then they come up with new browsers and new html standards and you do a tapdance of updates and searching to get back under the new ecosystem.. lather rinse repeat until you go slowly insane. What you end up doing is finding an editor that does ok basic wyswyg but you end up always always using the current browser set and html versions on live/test servers to really do your launch testing. So the answer is not really what has long legs.. the answer is get comfortable with a solution that lets you easily test on live (non-production) servers with the current ecosystem.

Personally.. I use Dreamweaver MX, Filezilla and a sprinkle of Notepad++. I do a lot of Joomla dev and custom coding and it works for me.. oh.. also get LAMP or WAMP going locally for great victory.

Install Wordpress and be done with it.

[odeland]

Install Wordpress and be done with it. Focus on content.

What if you don't know HTML, CSS, etc etc...

[Cutting_Crew]

then what is the best thing for that group? perhaps that would answer the question on the other end of the spectrum

Old School is the New School

[jman.org]

Have been down this road. FrontPage (shudder) in the 90's. DreamWeaver and others for a bit.

HTML, JS, CSS, XML, PHP, Python, Perl... it's all text. Finally realized I did not need a gui editor with internal browser.

Best bet is to know your code, have a good mental idea of what it will do, use the browser to verify.

The following is all open source, so no emptying of the wallet...

Put Apache on your dev machine so you can run vhosts. Modify your hosts file to point localhost to whatever internal-only domain name you choose.

Code with jEdit - java based so completely cross-platform, code folding, syntax highlighting, macro capability etc. A wonderful tool.

View with FireFox. Install the FireBug, Web Developer, ColorZilla and MeasureIt extensions. Find a 'doze machine somewhere so you can (begrudgingly) use IE just to make sure stuff is rendering as you expect. Install Opera & Chrome just because you can, though you'll use them the least.

Write code, save, tab over to FireFox, F5 to refresh. Rinse and repeat. You'll barely touch the mouse, as Ghu intended.

When things look good, upload with FileZilla (which supports SFTP, so you can safely dial in using your private key).

Good luck!

Thanks

[Dadoo]

Sorry to respond to my own post, but I have to say, wow, thanks to everyone who responded!

HTML-Kit

[SuperDre]

I use HTML-kit, which is wysiwyg and good for learning html.. I use the free version: http://www.htmlkit.com/

WYSIWYG vs WYGIWYC

[smisle]

As a web developer who started out with a WYSIWYG editor (Front page ... I know, I deserve to be shot), and then moved to a fancy graphical text editor, and now uses SSH and pico/nano or emacs on the server .. I'll say that my work flow, my code, and my websites are better with less between me and the code.

I've tried a few of the other WYSIWYGs over the years, and they always insert sub-standard code, or stupid cruft or do things exactly the wrong way (techniques that were cool 5 years ago or creating the whole thing with tables). If you don't care about that, you should be asking this question on 'smashing magazine' or some other designer's blog and not slashdot.

Re:Sorry, but what rock have you been living under

[WillKemp]

I always smile when you youngsters show up and complain about how bad things are. ;)

Thank you, grandad, i haven't been called a youngster for a long time and it's nice to be reminded there's someone older than me around! ;-)

I made my first web page in 1996 (according to the wayback machine) using a text editor (probably vi or emacs - i don't remember) and i made my last web page a couple of weeks ago, using geany. I've never been able to see the point of wysiwyg web editors. Creating a mess with nightmareweaver and then spending time fixing up so it works in the real world seems pointless to me as it's not really any quicker or easier than doing it from scratch in a text editor.

I use... mine

[rs79]

I wrote one in Unix/C 17 years ago. I've been adding to it and tweaking it on a daily basis since then. I used it images.killi.net mbz.org killi.net and other hobby crap, but it'll work on anything. I've never actually shown it to anyone cause I'm lazy, but it's pretty slick.

MOD PARENT UP

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Thanks so much for the highly useful info.

Re:Text editor of choice plus knowledge of HTML/CS

[Anonymous Freak]

Absolutely. And iWeb will even integrate with Google AdSense, if you really want to use iWeb, and want to potentially earn a little money.

Serious online tool: Squarespace

[dublin]

Most of the recommendations here are for the hardcore do-it-yourselfers. I'm perfectly capable of writing good HTML/CSS/JavaScript code (Notepad++ or vi) - BUT, because I don't do it day in and day out, I'm slow and never wind up doing it nearly as well as I wish I had. It's really hard to stay up with this stuff if you dont' live and breathe it. (I run a kick-ass web app development team, but I'm not a programmer - even that's still not enough to really stay on top of this technology from a DIY perspective...)

I think that's why the OP is asking about power tools. I've just been looking at some myself, and Squarespace.com definitely stands out from the crowd. It's a very solid CMS/editor/web site builder/manager app with some very large and successful customers. Since they're a for-pay service (you can try it for free), and have many serious customers, they're unlikely to go away soon, like many free hosted solutions.

BTW, I have no relation with Squarespace other than as a very likely potential customer: I've just been looking for a tool that lets me easily host, build, and manage killer sites without having to keep up with all kinds of arcane technical crap, and Squarespace seems to be the best thing I've found to do exactly that. I'm planning on using them to build my next couple of sites, and may even do a couple more just because of the leverage I expect it'll give me...

Visual vs. Long Haul: Pick One

[Millennium]

The state of the art in visual site editing tools is still in such a state of flux that there's no way to predict what will still be going in the long term and what will not. I hate to say it, but as long as you insist on visual tools you're doomed to the cycle of obsolescence for at least as long as it takes HTML5 to solidify, and probably longer.

If you want a piece of software that will let you edit Web pages (or entire sites) over the long haul, text is still your only real option. This may change at some future point, but that point is years away.