Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver?

An anonymous reader writes "I've been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver, and haven't stumbled upon anything that works the way I need. Aptana and Bluefish are fantastic tools, but I cannot work exclusively with them, since Bluefish doesn't have that WYSIWYG functionality that is so important when you're also dealing with design, and Aptana doesn't have classic ASP support. I don't care much about the classic ASP support, but, even though I'm a PHP developer, I give support to classic ASP code on a daily basis. What open source tools are you guys working with out there? I'm really not looking for a Dreamweaver clone, just a tool that gets closer to cover my needs: WYSIWYG, PHP, HTML, CSS support, and less important, classic ASP support."

Comments

notepad++ dude.

[unity100]

And good html knowledge. really, wysiwyg editors are not that professional in level.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[LWATCDR]

Really?
I use HTML toolkit for raw HTML editing but notepad++ is also good but he is not asking for that.
He wants a dreamweaver replacement. I would like one as well. Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything. And you always have an option to put it in your editor and edit it.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[drmitch]

Agreed. WYSIWYGs like DW only seem to muck up all the hard work I put into making my html look clean and concise. They add their own stupid DIV tags and ugly CSS code making it impossible to understand what's going on should you need to make edits without them. Think of it like writing source code, then trying to edit the assembly code when you make edits.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[ByOhTek]

WYSIWYG is not professional for many programming tasks, but for designers, unless you are in the scientific community, and sometimes even then, WYSIWYG is pretty much the professional standard. You'd probably have better traction saying OSS isn't professional (which might have worked 10 years ago... but isn't so true now).

Re:notepad++ dude.

[The MAZZTer]

Yup. I keep my webpage loaded in Chrome and just refresh whenever I make changes. That is my WYSIWYG.

And I can always use the Chrome Developer Tools to quickly see what a CSS or HTML tweak will do to my page before I go into my code and change it for real to test it.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Divide By Zero]

Way to really not even try to be helpful.

WYSIWYG editors are wildly helpful when it comes to saving time and opportunities to typo your code. If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.) If time and accuracy are no object, it's a hobby or you're learning. In those cases, by all means, use a straight up text editor, because you're writing web pages for the joy of doing it, or you need to do it more to practice and get better at it.

For the rest of us, who do this sort of thing for a living, or as a time-sensitive project, we need pages coded quickly and accurately, which is why we (convince our employers to) pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for products like Dreamweaver. The split view in Dreamweaver is really useful for doing tricky layouts. Let the program do the heavy lifting by dropping in whatever blocks/tables/whatever that you need, tweak the code as necessary to get the desired result, push the changes up to pre-production, and get on to the next thing that needs to be done ALL WITHOUT SWITCHING WINDOWS. It doesn't leave out tags, it doesn't typo parameters, it doesn't forget the name of that one variable you need to change to get what you're looking for.

If you're shunning tools to make you more productive in the name of intellectual purity, you're just being difficult and spiteful to yourself, your boss, your employer, your client, or any number of other stakeholders, people who need to see the work done for a reason other than to demonstrate you can do it.

tl;dr: No.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[ilsaloving]

And that's why Designers have no business doing programming tasks. Designers *design*. They focus on looks. That's their job. The last time I saw a web page built by a designer, it took 30 seconds just to load the page because they added so many wordpress plugins to make their site look "just so".

People seem to have this bizarre notion that just because one is able to make a computer do something, that makes them a programmer. I can wield a hammer. Does that make me a carpenter? No. I have a drill with a selection of very fine drill bits. Does that make me a dentist? I sure as hell hope not.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[elrous0]

Not everyone has the luxury of a large, diversified staff. Some people have to wear a lot of different hats.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider myself a professional web-designer, and when it comes to HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, I haven't touched a WYSIWYG editor in aaages. The only thing I use a WYSIWYG application for is for the initial mock-up of a design (in Inkscape or Illustrator etc), after that I craft a clean and semantic HTML page (in vim, but obviously any text-editor works for that), then I start styling, adding extra DIVs along the way if needed. Then I start moving the HTML over into templates and move on to the server-side bits.

I find that writing the HTML is very trivial and a WYSIWYG editor just gets in the way of producing clean and semantically correct HTML, and I'd be surprised if using that for authoring fully featured websites is actually a 'professional standard' these days.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Professional web designer here, no other web designer I've ever met uses the wysiwyg features of dreamweaver, they use the code view exclusively.
I personally use sublime text 2.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

A web page isn't WYSIWYG... the content is supposed to flow depending on the size of the browser window. Any tool that abuses tables for screen layout is hopelessly fucked. I've probably cursed one of your websites trying to view it on a smartphone. I suppose you use Word because TEX or LATEX isn't WYSIWYG...

Re:notepad++ dude.

[LordThyGod]

Great advice for novices or amateurs. I do work in a web shop, and all the designers here have access to Dreamweaver licenses if they want it. I can't remember the last time any of them actually used it. They all have Creative Suite Web premium or whatever it is, photoshop, etc. They are more productive without Dreamweaver. You want to see what your code looks like in browser? Then look at it in a browser. Editors are for editing, and browsers are for .... browsing. Works great.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. This one got funnier over the decades. Oh wait, no, IT WAS NEVER FUNNY!

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shush, you. There's fine alternatives if you have to have your eyecandy. Just not in combination with support for a certain commercial product. In that case, you're still stuck to a commercial program. OH BOO-HOO. Watch me weep and play a very tiny violin. Really now.

'Sides, if you're so pro, what's wrong with paying for good tools? The only really bad thing about adobe is that they're very bad indeed about supporting anything but windows. Complain to them, start your own enterprise, that sort of thing.

tl;dr: We don't do that 'round here.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use dreamweaver in *code* view...I like the syntax highlighting and syncing with my dev/test/prod servers. I have only rarely used the WYSIWYG capabilities of Dreamweaver because DW does not render many server-side scripts in the Design view, even if Live preview is on. For simple HTML or CSS changes, I still find DW Design view inadequate. I code in DW, if I want to see the output I use a *browser* (usually several browsers). DW is great for professionals and novices, but don't rely on the WYSIWYG...for web design it is all about what it looks like in the browser.

To really troll this topic, I have now been forced to use SharePoint Designer 2010...and it is actually not that bad, even though I am a back-end developer, I still have to do UI/UX and tweak look&feel...it's the best tool for the job for SharePoint.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Want a Dreamweaver replacement? Post your job up on Craigslist and Monster. There are plenty of people around that actually know how to code and don't need a WYSIWYG editor to accomplish their tasks.

If you 're doing anything more than a blog post, you should not be using a WYSIWYG editor.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

People who have to wear the hat that says "programmer" should either figure out how to do that job, or find someone else to wear the hat.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.
I've worked for several companies over the years - some large and some small. A common line of interview questions seems to revolve around whether I'd prefer a big company or small company, what the difference is as you work for one of these companies, etc. My answer is along the lines of:
An advantage of working at a small company you get to do everything.
An disadvantage of working at a small company you have to do everything.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[diodeus]

WYSIWYG editors are never true representations of what you're going to see in a browser (choose which one) anyway. You're far better off simply previewing in the browser and using Firebug Etc. to be your "split view".

There are some things that are useful in DW - such as table manipulation, which I found indispensable when doing online annual reports and similar work. Paste-from-Word is also useful. Aside from that, the WYSIWYG is a bit of a crutch. DW the right tool.....sometimes.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Tsingi]

A web page isn't WYSIWYG... the content is supposed to flow depending on the size of the browser window. Any tool that abuses tables for screen layout is hopelessly fucked. I've probably cursed one of your websites trying to view it on a smartphone. I suppose you use Word because TEX or LATEX isn't WYSIWYG...

LOL!

I agree 100%, too bad you have described 80% of the web.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[PopeRatzo]

WYSIWYGs like DW only seem to muck up all the hard work I put into making my html look clean and concise.

You understand that not everyone has the same goals and requirements that you have?

As a piano player, I always felt that the ukulele was a terribly limited instrument. The range too small, only four notes at a time, not a lot of projection. Until I played the ukulele and realized that an entirely different level of expression was possible with an instrument where you could manipulate the sound-creating elements directly with your fingers. But of course, neither a ukulele or a piano is a chromatic harmonica or a hammer dulcimer.

Just because you value certain attributes of a tool for creating a web page doesn't mean everyone does.

Think of it like writing source code

No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.

The guy asked a simple question, and as usual he is told, "No, you mustn't want what you want, you must want what WE want!"

So, let me repeat the question: What's the best open source replacement for Dreamweaver? Points off if your answer is a text editor.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

table>tr*9>td*7

zen coding ftw

Re:notepad++ dude.

[halivar]

A full-time designer does not have the time to learn how to program. The good ones end up having to work 12 hour work days, seven days a week, as it is. And many design firms do not spend the money required to get a good coder to help the designers.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

7x9, sure
<table>
<?php
$tablecontents=array(
        array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9),
        array('a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i'),
        array('j','k','l','m','n','o','p','q','r'),
        array('s','t','u','v','w','x','y','z',0),
        array('A','B','C','D','E','F','G','H','I'),
        array('J','K','L','M','N','O','P','Q','R'),
        array('S','T','U','V','W','X','Y','Z',0),
        array(9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1)
);
foreach($tablecontents as $key=>$row) {
        $output='<tr class="'.(($key%2 == 0)?'even':'odd').'">';
        foreach($row as $ckey=>$cell) {
                $output.='<td class="col'.$ckey.'">'.$cell.'</td>';
        }
        echo $output.'</tr>';
}
?>
</table>

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Tsingi]

Way to really not even try to be helpful.

WYSIWYG editors are wildly helpful when it comes to saving time and opportunities to typo your code. If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.) If time and accuracy are no object, it's a hobby or you're learning. In those cases, by all means, use a straight up text editor, because you're writing web pages for the joy of doing it, or you need to do it more to practice and get better at it.

For the rest of us, who do this sort of thing for a living, or as a time-sensitive project, we need pages coded quickly and accurately, which is why we (convince our employers to) pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for products like Dreamweaver. The split view in Dreamweaver is really useful for doing tricky layouts. Let the program do the heavy lifting by dropping in whatever blocks/tables/whatever that you need, tweak the code as necessary to get the desired result, push the changes up to pre-production, and get on to the next thing that needs to be done ALL WITHOUT SWITCHING WINDOWS. It doesn't leave out tags, it doesn't typo parameters, it doesn't forget the name of that one variable you need to change to get what you're looking for.

If you're shunning tools to make you more productive in the name of intellectual purity, you're just being difficult and spiteful to yourself, your boss, your employer, your client, or any number of other stakeholders, people who need to see the work done for a reason other than to demonstrate you can do it.

tl;dr: No.

I can produce an error free 7x9 table in microseconds if I generate it. Using an editor, 5 seconds? No.

I switch windows a lot too. I'm also shunning tools to make me more productive. (Couldn't resist)

WYSIWIG tools create shite. I love the little band of content that decorates the middle of my huge web browser. Yeah, that's why HTML was designed to flow, so you could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to use a tool that produces that stripe, not to mention automatically including 87 XSS scripts to track my every move. I actually don't know that they do that, it's an empirical observation on crap sites. It could be similar to the "research causes cancer in rats" model.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Frosty Piss]

Editors are for editing, and browsers are for .... browsing. Works great.

Notepad++, Firefox + web developer plug-in

Re:notepad++ dude.

[LWATCDR]

Dude I have been hand coding HTML since you pretty much had no other option.
However when working one a simple page it is sometimes nice to just throw it into a WYSIWYG editor and do the layout or simple form. I have never used dreamweaver myself but I know of people that do and find it a useful tool. Again I tend to use HTML-Toolkit or Notepad++ because I often need to tweak code by hand. The fact that I have never had the time to sit down and learn dreamweaver does not make it a bad tool.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you. Real men don't use WYSIWYG editors- Real men eat bags of glass. Real men chew on the lit ends of highway flares. Real men lift their cars with one hand while they change a tire with the other. If someone can't do any of this, save us the trouble of mocking you and go join a burlesque chorus line.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[dhasenan]

But it would be unquestionably useful to have code in one pane and a browser window in the other, so you can update the code and see immediately what effects your changes had.

Epiphany ( http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/ ) will automatically reload any page opened on the local filesystem when that page changes, so it's a reasonable standin for that use case. Not a great one, mind, but it should work.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[King_TJ]

Absolutely true .... I've never used a WYSIWYG HTML editor before that didn't make a mess of the original code. BUT, until the day comes along where someone's able to build one that produces only clean code? It's the nature of the beast.

IMO, web sites really take two basic forms (with a lot of "gray area" in-between in some cases). Either you're essentially building a web APPLICATION ... a relatively interactive site that does data lookups from a back-end database, and/or interfaces with other Internet sites to pull and filter content for re-display, OR you're building a more static site intended to serve as a business's "shingle on the net", or photo gallery, or ?? The folks doing the later are usually far better served with apps along the lines of Dreamweaver (or on the Mac side, I prefer such tools as Rapidweaver with 3rd. party plug-ins and extensions). A full grasp of HTML code isn't even really necessary to do a good job with sites of this sort. Much more critical is a good sense of style and design, while hanging onto the concept that part of that impression the site makes on viewers involves loading time, as well.

The coders like to call these more static, design-oriented sites "less professional" because they clearly weren't hand-coded, and the HTML source is typically a big mess. But quite frankly, they're also the sites I see that are usually the most visually appealing and when done properly, have the most efficiently organized layouts of their content too.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

you have to think of it as writing source code if you want any professional credibility, there's no such thing as WYSIWIG for html development.

The simple fact is that the WYS part varies wildley depending on the device and settings used by the end-user. Consequently designing with wysiwig tools at a wysiwig level is guaranteed to lead to a failed design (especially with all the crap everye wysiwig tool I've ever seen throws into the actual code).

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Quiet_Desperation]

Punchmaster? Is that you?

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Quiet_Desperation]

So, let me repeat the question: What's the best open source replacement for Dreamweaver?

Emacs! :-)

Points off if your answer is a text editor.

It's not a text editor! It's a lifestyle!

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so not true. I am a full-time designe,r with web developer tendencies, and work with many others. In order to create an optimal design I made sure to learn the basics, and beyond in some instances, of the programming language used on the application layer. This way I could design specifically to the needs of the environment and not come up with some awesome design that the client winds up wanting but can't be implemented due to the restrictions of the platform used to deliver the site. (rare cases but still something to be mindful of when designing a site)

Those who strictly use DW to code their sites and lean on the inferior internal browser implementation of DW aren't going to go very far in this career field. You need to set up multiple external browsers and refresh those pages accordingly within their respective windows after making changes in DW. That is the only way to ensure cross-browser support when using DW.

If all you do is learn DW and not the underlying languages used to createweb sites then you might as well be a monkey with a hammer because your skills aren't going to be in high demand when most clients want SEO, semantic code and fast loading scenarios for their websites and applications.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the reason 90% of the web is a steaming pile of shit. I don't mind though. I also happen to do this sort of thing for a living, and it consists of cleaning up and fixing the crap you leave behind.

There seems to be a large amount of people who still think a giant bloated blob of HTML actually makes for a decent website these days; people who don't understand what semantic HTML means or the benefits it brings and who think the time it takes to turn a design into something that looks the same in your browser is actually a good measure of productivity (as if the few seconds you save by spitting out tables and not checking your design in an actual browser outweighs the difficulty you will get when you actually need to maintain a website).

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only on Windows. Where is the Linux version? No Linux text editor that I am aware of is nearly as good as Notepad++.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. To put things in perspective a little bit:

I design and print artwork for a living. I *could* create all my vector prints using Postscript, and all my raster images using a hex editor and encapsulating the image data between Postscript tags prior to print. In fact, I could then rasterize these files for print by cross referencing all of the color data required on a pixel by pixel basis, then converting this pixel data into the bit format (including header data and possibly frame order) of the inkjet I want to use. Oh, and then I could send the data to the printer, bit after bit after bit, making sure I close the data connection so I can ready for the next job.

I actually do have the knowledge to do all of those things, and for the most part I could provide pretty good results, once I was done debugging and manipulating the data. But it would take hours or days to complete a single job. By using tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, a RIP, ICC profiles, a proper printer driver, etc) that automate all the boring, repeatable, and tedious stuff, I'm far, FAR more productive. Sure, there's no way in hell I could edit an .eps from Illustrator by hand due to all of the extra crap in the file, or modify a data stream on the fly, but it "just works".

I don't think it's unfair for web developers to want to find tools that automate their workflow. The arguments about "bloat" or "30 seconds to load the page" or "can't edit the code" aren't complaints about WYSIWYG in general; those complaints are about shitty WYSIWYG applications. Lean on the companies companies that make these programs instead of leaning on the folks that want to use them, because automation is badass and here to stay.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mcgrew]

Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything.

As in "fast, cheap, or good -- pick two?" I
I've notices that ten years ago before these types of programs became widespread, pretty much any page would render well on pretty much any browser or monitor. Now, I go to Yahoo News using FF on IE7 and the goddamned video window covers the text. I go to most sites with my phone and it won't render at all.

Fast and lazy produces junk that kinda sorta works sometimes under some circumstances. Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere. Whether or not to use a tool like Dreamweaver depends on whether or not you want quality, and whether or not you know how to code. And IMO if you don't know HTML and CSS you shouldn't be producing web pages in the first place.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, maybe I'm alone here...BUT, I for one am quite glad that I can't generate a 7x9 table in 5 seconds by hand. Hell, I'm happy not to use tables at all. imho they're a scourge, an artifact of horrible web design practices leftover from when those who were doing web design could never have generated their bloated tripe by hand.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[hedwards]

It's not as user friendly, but you can use sed and awk to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

It's not as user friendly as Dreamweaver, but you can create templates of pages, transform an XML page into something that's supported under HTML and do so efficiently. What's more once you've got it set up, the amount of time it takes to update the site is quite small and you can even completely change the formatting without too much effort once you've done a new set of templates.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mcgrew]

No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.

The trouble is, you still wind up with HTML and CSS, except that it won't render well on but half the screens and browsers, you will have no idea how screwed it is on any screen you haven't tried it on. You want to place objects on a blank page. What's the aspect ratio of your blank page? What's the orientation of your blank page? How big is your blank page? Is your blank page a six foot wide mural, or a phone screen? Design for one and it will suck on the other. Design for portrait and it will suck in landscape. That's why HTML is a markup language; no two screens are going to render the same, and the more you try to force it, the worse it will render.

These tools all produce crappy code. How good is your phone at understanding voice commands? Well, that's about how good these tools are at writing code.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[LWATCDR]

Ahhh you are nuts.
10 years ago you have Netscape and IE and they both had very different implementations of HTML/javascript and 10 years ago was when you saw this evil on many websites.
"This site best viewed in IE..."

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mounthood]

If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.)

Use zen coding: table>tbody>tr*7>td*9

I agree that the previous poster was unhelpful, but I think text+browser design is faster then Dreamweaver. For one thing you get to test the design in multiple browsers easily/naturally.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[webheaded]

I've been making and editing web pages for about 14 years now (started in the blink tag years of the 90s when I was 12...I remember Frontpage Express and Frontpage 98 being the tools of the day). WYSIWYG editors still have a place for me. They make the work easier. I can write some code and immediately see an approximation of what it will look like. I can right click in an area and insert a table. Copy and paste a row here, there, etc. In Dreamweaver, I discovered that I could hold ctrl and select every other row in a table and change the CSS class in an instant. That is so helpful that I cannot even begin to tell you how much love I have for the program. It's awesome. I can select a big sentence and bold, italicize, select a different class to use, etc. Doing all of these things by hand takes longer. Anyone says they exclusively do all these things in GUI or Code mode is probably a jackass that wants to brag about how l33tz0rz he is. You use the best tool for the job...not the more elite way of doing it. All GUI makes shit code. All code makes everything a huge pain in the ass. You do a mix of the two and you still get what you want. I code my CSS by hand, obviously, and then I apply things to the page inside the GUI...make adjustments here and there in the code. Going into the code is for doing the complicated things that your editor does not do...but are you going to tell me you want to make tables by hand and sit there and bold/underline text by hand in your code? That's retarded.

I know how to do ALL of these things by hand. Like I said...I've been doing this for a VERY long time...but you know what? Sometimes it is simply faster through the GUI. Sometimes it spits out some nasty code, but then again, Dreamweaver is NOT Frontpage. I actually get some pretty nice clean code from Dreamweaver. I am consistently amazed at what a well written program Dreamweaver actually is. Adobe might overcharge for those programs like nobody's business, but you know...they're good programs (at least Photoshop and Dreamweaver are). It's a bit buggy and crashes on occasion but I mostly attribute that to my work PC being a festering pile of shit. Everything is locked down so tight on this machine that programs don't seem to behave properly.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Ihmhi]

How? I mean, I've used Dreamweaver before. I *also* hate the <div> tags and whatnot it adds... so I don't use the graphic editor. I have the text window open, edit in there, and I see the results in the preview version in real time. Why not just do that? It's certainly better than having a browser open on half your screen/out of focus/another monitor and constantly refreshing...

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Snaller]

"For the rest of us, who do this sort of thing for a living, or as a time-sensitive project, we need pages coded quickly and accurately, which is why we (convince our employers to) pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for products like Dreamweaver."

Which is probably why there are millions of unreadable websites out there, unless people have to be using the system you couldn't be bothered to develop properly on.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[unity100]

just use wine. it runs very well.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Urza9814]

Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere.

...if your website is rather simple. Otherwise, you still need to code around the remaining IE problems, and the problems in older versions of IE (the publishing firm I work with STILL has clients using IE6...so I still have to code for IE6...) and the non-standard features of different browsers (ever use Javascript event handling? Try to make something follow a mouse cursor? Opacity in CSS?) and let's not even get into if you want to use HTML5...

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mcgrew]

They focus on looks. That's their job. The last time I saw a web page built by a designer, it took 30 seconds just to load the page because they added so many wordpress plugins to make their site look "just so".

And it's hilarious, because its isn't going to look "just so" unless the user is using the exact same monitor/screen, same resolution, same aspect ratio, same orientation, and maybe even same browser.

I can wield a hammer. Does that make me a carpenter?

Yes, but it doesn't make you a competent carpenter. That takes training and practice, like everything else.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[GameboyRMH]

You think that's bad, wait until you have to modify some page made with Babby's First WYSIWYG HTML Editor.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[avandesande]

Dreamweaver is useless for production code because the HTML it makes is junk- if you want to make any adjustments to the HTML you have to do it all over again in Dreamweaver because the source is very difficult to edit- and then you lose any changes that were made directly to the source.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Outtascope]

So, let me repeat the question: What's the best open source replacement for Dreamweaver? Points off if your answer is a text editor.

What is 2 + 3? Points off if you answer 5.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[azalin]

Really? I use HTML toolkit for raw HTML editing but notepad++ is also good but he is not asking for that. He wants a dreamweaver replacement. I would like one as well. Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything. And you always have an option to put it in your editor and edit it.

Dreamweaver does have it's place in web page development though I would never use it without a good text editor (notepad++, editplus, emacs) to handle the fine tuning and script coding.
An opensource variant of it, like gimp is to photoshop or libreoffice is to ms office, would indeed be very helpful.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't one. Dreamweaver and its ilk are dead. Now sod off, troll.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[azalin]

Sometimes fast beats hand codeing everything.

As in "fast, cheap, or good -- pick two?" I I've notices that ten years ago before these types of programs became widespread, pretty much any page would render well on pretty much any browser or monitor. Now, I go to Yahoo News using FF on IE7 and the goddamned video window covers the text. I go to most sites with my phone and it won't render at all.

Fast and lazy produces junk that kinda sorta works sometimes under some circumstances. Write your code by hand and stick to standards, and it will render well anywhere. Whether or not to use a tool like Dreamweaver depends on whether or not you want quality, and whether or not you know how to code. And IMO if you don't know HTML and CSS you shouldn't be producing web pages in the first place.

That must have been a very different ten years ago from the ones I remember. You had to make at least two versions of the page and the scripts to go with it because otherwise it would just break. There was basically no f*cking way to guarantee how the page would look like in different browsers (or versions of those).

Re:notepad++ dude.

[azalin]

And let the heretics of the church of vi forever rot in the core dumps of hell! Amen

Re:notepad++ dude.

[TuringTest]

No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.

As much as I empathize with your wants, I'm afraid the other answers in this thread are right. If you want to approach content creation as if it were page layout software, you shouldn't be creating web content. The web has always been primarily about the content logical structure. The native visual style for the web is the reflowing layout.

Now that responsive web design is gaining traction, we finally have a chance to have WYSIWYIG tools that create native web structures, but that moment simply hasn't arrived yet. Dreamweaver and the equivalent group of visual HTML generators from the late XX century create fixed content, and are not up to the task to create modern pages that can be adapted to the current explosion of diverging form factors. To apply responsive design, you must learn the basics of semantic HTML layout + CSS presentation, and there's no visual tool to create that (yet).

Re:notepad++ dude.

[orasio]

That's a dumb comparison.
Dreamweaver is a lot of tools into one.
Most HTML people I know use it as a nice text editor.
I have also seen fresh from school designers use it as a WYSIWYG editor, with awful results.

I don't mean that it's impossible to use Dreamweaver effectively as a WYSIWYG editor, only that it's not its main strenght in practice.

That 's why so many people say that you can replace it by a text editor, because so many pros use it as a text editor.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[krinderlin]

I was wondering about that. I always thought Dreamweaver was some sort of Click&Drag developer tool (a la Visual Studio Web RAD?) that mostly tried to get you to use Cold Fusion. However, because Cold Fusion is...let's not talk about full fledged enterprise applications in Cold Fusion. It's not the point and I just got off my blood pressure medicine.

Anyway, later on because no one was using it, they bolted on php/ASP and some other stuff too, right? Or am I completely off on this?

Re:notepad++ dude.

[green1]

What would be even better is a setup where you have the 2 panes, but can edit in either one and see the results in the other. Code in the one pane, then decide you don't like the look of it, and drag an element somewhere else on the page and see the raw HTML update. I do all of my HTML work by hand in a text editor. And I strongly believe that everyone who codes should have a good understanding of the underlying HTML and be able to use it. That said, I don't see any reason why people shouldn't be able to have a tool that complements that by allowing quick and dirty grab and move that element, resize this one, etc, etc. It's true that many WYSIWYG editors produce atrociously bad code, but there is no fundamental reason that they have to.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[GameboyRMH]

SciTE is pretty close, they're both Scintilla-based.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[PopeRatzo]

If you want to approach content creation as if it were page layout software, you shouldn't be creating web content.

Now you're going to decide who can and cannot create web content? No sir, you don't get to make that decision. You can decide whether or not you want to visit his website with all its sloppy cruft-filled code, but you don't get to decide whether or not he is allowed to create such a page or which software he uses.

Dreamweaver and the equivalent group of visual HTML generators from the late XX century create fixed content, and are not up to the task to create modern pages that can be adapted to the current explosion of diverging form factors.

Again, you're deciding what a "modern" web page must be.

To apply responsive design, you must learn the basics of semantic HTML layout + CSS presentation, and there's no visual tool to create that (yet).

Its certainly possible to learn the basics of semantic html layout + CSS presentation and still appreciate the help that a visual tool, even an imperfect one, can provide. I get the feeling that the notepad++ purists might not know how good Dreamweaver has become, especially when you've got a group of people working on various parts of an enterprise web site. And it's dead easy to use both Dreamweaver and notepad++, each for it's own purpose. You might be surprised how little crap Dreamweaver actually inserts into the code. We're not talking about Frontpage here.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

The original post requests both PHP and ASP. Those are coding languages. "I want a car that I don't have to drive, but I don't want to take a train, or a bus, or a limo, or a cab, or learn to drive, and don't you dare tell me that I'm asking the wrong question."

Um. Okay. Have you tried "good luck with that?"

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Real men lift their cars with one hand while they change a tire with the other.

No, real men DON"T lift their cars with one hand while changing tires. Real men drive REAL cars that can't be lifted with one or except in truly exceptional-man cases, even two hands. Cars with Strength. Engines. Mass. If you own a wienie little clown car, Smart cart or stubbed-toe Euro-pimple on wheels, then congratulations, Miss.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[rolias]

With Org-mode!

Re:notepad++ dude.

[quintus_horatius]

The trouble is, you still wind up with HTML and CSS, except that it won't render well on but half the screens and browsers, you will have no idea how screwed it is on any screen you haven't tried it on.

Have you ever even used Dreamweaver? In comments people keep beating this drum that all HTML IDEs like Dreamweaver produce bloated, incompatible code. You all act like it's Frontpage or something.

Dreamweaver can produce crap in the hands of people that don't know what they're doing. Any tool can, no matter how complex or simple.

I'm a programmer that occasionally uses Dreamweaver. I use it to write my HTML and CSS by hand, quickly check the results, and take advantage of code highlighting, tag completion, and syntax checking all in one stop. The web designers that I work with use it similarly - they're using it to produce the best code in the fastest possible way. They interested in making cross-compatible pages and make their due-diligence inside and outside of Dreamweaver to achieve that. Now, if you have used DW or a similar quality IDE and found that your code was buggy and incompatible, then maybe it was your design skills that are lacking, not the IDE.

This thread is for the big boys to discuss alternatives to Dreamweaver - something I'm interested in since I don't know of any good ones myself. If you can, please leave your preconceptions behind and try to add constructively to the conversation, not bat down anything that doesn't agree with your dogma.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[ryanov]

I've never seen a WSYWYG editor that didn't generate tons of garbage HTML for every move you made. That alone makes them not worth it.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[iceaxe]

You are correct, however...

Many people doing exactly the sort of work that the OP seems to want to do find that they are better off and more productive using a somewhat different workflow than what most people trained on DW use. Anyone's mileage may vary, of course, but here's my recommendation, based on quite a few years in that very business:

There is no open source drop-in replacement for DreamWeaver.

In my opinion, this is a good thing, because DreamWeaver is a pretty good code editor, with a mediocre at best 'WYSIWYG' design tool which produces bad (at best) code which I can only recommend for throwaway designs you will never have to change or support. The code produced has gotten MUCH MUCH better than it was a decade ago, but it's still crap I wouldn't want to have to deal with later.

So, I use a real graphic design application to design the appearance. I then use a good code editor to write good, clean, standards compliant code to implement the design. As I code, I view the result frequently in multiple actual browsers, so that what I see is what I will REALLY get, in all its quirky varieties. When the browser looks just like the original comp, we're golden, at least until the requirements change (again, and again).

Some will say that this has the drawback that you have to learn how to write the code. I will submit that HTML, CSS, and Javascript take less time to learn than you would spend fighting with the crud spat out by WYSIWYG tools, and once you've made that time investment, you have more power and flexibility than any code generating tool can provide.

IF you are building one-time only static web pages that will be posted and removed after a while and never looked at again, then by all means use something that makes it easy. If you are going to have to live with the results for a long time, doing it right to begin with pays off over time.

Caveat: I once spent two years during which one of my responsibilities was to maintain and enhance an extensive and very public website which had been 'designed' in DreamWeaver, using some of DW's design time templating capabilities. It took me a while to excise that cancer and heal the scars, but in the end we had a clean, maintainable site with complete fidelity to the original visual design and greatly reduced maintenance and development costs. This has left me with a particular distaste for that tool, so take what I say with that in mind. Also, I use emacs to write Perl code, so I may be skewed in general.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[TuringTest]

You might be surprised how little crap Dreamweaver actually inserts into the code. We're not talking about Frontpage here.

I'm glad that Dreamweaver is better in that respect, and I recognize the value of automating the creation of repetitive tags even if it only allows for a partial pipeline that must be completed by hand in text. But color me sceptical that the code thus generated will not suffer from a fixed layout that's hard to reshape into a properly resizable layout - I have yet to see it to believe it.

Now you're going to decide who can and cannot create web content? No sir, you don't get to make that decision. You can decide whether or not you want to visit his website with all its sloppy cruft-filled code, but you don't get to decide whether or not he is allowed to create such a page or which software he uses.

Well yes, of course I will decide which pages look modern to me. And I'll keep my opinion that people creating fixed layouts are a blame to the web's usability when they break my navigation habits at my preferred zoom level, window size or portable device. A page that doesn't render correctly in modern devices is not modern by definition. The sad thing is that likely they are not even aware of the pain they impose on their users.

And I'll keep thinking that someone who wants to create pixel-perfect content should be using pdf documents instead of HTML, which has always been intended to be a semantic markup to be reinterpreted by the client in alternate ways as controlled by the user, not the publisher; that's the foundation of the Web as an internet application, to allow content that can outlive the software environment in which it was created. Not recognizing the basic purpose for which the tool you use was created will make you a sloppy creator, and no amount of "I'm-entitled-to-use-the-tool-my-own-way" will turn a bad use of the technology into a good one.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[HairOfTheBambit]

I think there's a rather large difference in creating graphics and creating a web site. If for no other reason, maintaining a web site in the future is MUCH easier if the underlying code is easily readable and standard compliant. Somethings may get tedious, but a decent context aware text editor up front (one that can generate closing tags, or check syntax as you type) can save you lots of time in the future. And if you know what you are doing and can type at a decent rate, the speed advantage of a WYSIWYG editor is pretty minor.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Ophbalance]

You're completely off. ColdFusion was created by Allaire. Dreamweaver was created by... eh, I forget and am far too lazy to look it up. At any rate, Dreawmweaver was JUST a WYSIWIG editor before being snapped up by Macromedia. They (Macromedia) integrated CFML support (Macromedia acquired CF as well). Dreamweaver also supports JS/HTML/ASP/JSP/JS libraries at this point (jQuery mobile support being pretty nifty).

ColdFusion had an IDE for a long time that was separate from DW, and once again has its own IDE in the form of CF Builder. And until PHP/ASP jobs start paying what a CFML job pays... "get off my lawn" :P.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Octopus]

It may be easier for you to build a house out of housey-looking parts, but that doesn't mean anyone should have to live in it. Ask the Haitians.

Same with site building. You choose to be able to drag-and-drop your designs onto a canvas, rather than build standards-compliant markup that is easy to maintain. You're skimping and cutting corners on technology, in a technology industry. If you did the same thing in physical construction, and someone died, you'd be toast.

Sure, I'm being silly and hyperbolic. But when you ask how to find a free tool to create a lesser quality product because you can't be arsed to code, and someone points it out, don't get your dander up.

Take it like a man, or stop banging out web sites with a ukelele.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

What about geany?

Re:notepad++ dude.

[micheas]

Running tidy is the first step for such sites.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[GenSolo]

If you want to approach content creation as if it were page layout software, you shouldn't be creating web content.

Now you're going to decide who can and cannot create web content? No sir, you don't get to make that decision.

Perhaps I'm the illiterate one, but I read "shouldn't", not "can't." We all get to make that decision for ourselves. It's called an opinion.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[saltydogdesign]

Your analogy is a bit off. Allow me to correct it: Text editor is to piano as Dreamweaver is to Rock Band guitar controller.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[saltydogdesign]

And Dreamweaver is a hat you wear on your ass.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would God drive a car that was so heavy he couldn't lift it with one arm?

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium .... which includes Dreamweaver ...

Re:notepad++ dude.

[PopeRatzo]

Text editor is to piano as Dreamweaver is to Rock Band guitar controller.

You can make serious music with a Rock Band guitar controller , friend.

Is it optimal? No. Can it be used to serve the desire to create? Absolutely.

Because we love technology does not mean we must ignore our imagination.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[saltydogdesign]

You're citing the exception that proves the rule. I'm not talking about love of technology blocking your imagination. Quite the contrary — it's about trying to use a technology to mask a lack of knowledge and technique. If you have those, then sure, you can make music with a tin can and a spoon. But if you don't know what you're doing, owning a Casio with an arpeggiation function isn't going to save you.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[ResidentSourcerer]

I think there is merit in WYSIWYG editors for 'story boards' It's quick to layout. You can try various looks, even create sample navigation for interaction.

But any significant website is almost certain to use some form of template system.

I ended up doing a first stab at my personal web page using the composer in Mozilla. Once I got the LOOK I wanted, I redid the first few pages in HTML by hand. And then with MUCH cleaner and simpler HTML, I went to Template Toolkit to control page generation. And then I installed the Markdown module for TT and essentially eliminated 95% of my html. (I still have to use some divs for positioning.)

Spent a lot of time with a single CSS file so that the page behaves reasonably with any non-pathological browser/screen combo.

The end result is a site with about 80 pages, statically served, but regenerated as needed. http://sherwoods-forests.com/ if you want to look.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[Shifty0x88]

I've never seen a WSYWYG editor that didn't generate tons of garbage HTML for every move you made. That alone makes them not worth it.

I agree with you here, I remember when I played around with it and looked at the code behind what I was doing... I was appalled to say the least when I saw the code that got generated for doing simple text placement. Now it has been a long time since I've looked at it, but I imagine it will be similar.

So with that being said..... here comes your old friend..... who is it?!?!?! .......GOOGLE

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mcgrew]

Odd, the javascript and HTML I was using on my sites worked in either browser. You only got the "best viewed in..." at your site if you sucked at writing web pages, didn't follow WC3 standards (both browsers had "extras" that weren't part of the standard), and especially if you used MS's proprietary HTML "standards" (like their "mouseover" tag; I used javascript for mouseovers, mine worked in both) and j-Script instead of javascript... and especially if you didn't know how to code at all and used MS's Front Page.

Then as now, if you suck at HTML you suck at making web sites. If you use an HTML generator rather than learning HTML, your site will suck as bad as 90% of them out there. Want your site to stand out? Hire a good coder.

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mcgrew]

To tell the truth I haven't done any HTML or javascript for maybe 5 years, and aside from not having slashdot-like forums my "Springfield Fragfest" site was as sophisticated as anything out there (my other sies were simple as dirt). As it was a gaming site, yes I did have things following the cursor, I had animated graphic mouseovers in the navigation buttons, and little fun things like a danceing strogg that if you moused over it, Sonic the Hedgehog would zip past, the Strogg got annoyed, and Sonic ran past again and got bloodily stomped on (it was my own animations). I had user-controllable music (play/stop/volume), falling snow in December, etc. I didn't find it hard at all. I might today, like I said I haven't coded in a while.

As to IE6, I feel your pain. I let my sites lapse about the same time it came around; they just got rid of that clusterfuck of a browser where I work a few months ago. Somebody should have been boiled in oil for releasing IE6!

Re:notepad++ dude.

[mcgrew]

You hit the nail square on the head. I didn't use DreamWeaver myself, but I did examine the code in almost any site I visited, and never saw anything but a clusterfuck on any of them, but the way you're doing it sounds like exactly the way to do it. You are correct, just because you own a hammer and saw doesn't make you a carpenter. It takes training and practice.

Sadly, it seems there are very few like you. It seems that most places are like "a coder costs WHAT? Look, just buy a copy of DreamWeaver and let the intern make the damned site!"

Re:notepad++ dude.

[ryanov]

Wow, the top result too. Ouch.

KompoZer

[symes]

Is quite nice, not sure if it meets your ASP needs though

Re:KompoZer

[cshark]

It's a terrible code editor.

Re:KompoZer

[jockeys]

I've used it and like it, too. The split-view is helpful.

Re:KompoZer

[webheaded]

I've tried it. Program doesn't even remotely hold a candle to Dreamweaver. It is a nice effort but it is really not very good. It doesn't even have a place to see your HTML code properly (at least not very easily). There is a little area at the bottom but that isn't even the code for the entire page...program is just kind of a mess.

Re:KompoZer

[Anonymous Coward]

KompoZer's development seemed to trail off years ago. It's quite buggy and can be very frustrating trying to accomplish simple tasks. As well it has an irritating habit of sticking tags everywhere in tables. It's pretty rudimentary overall.

WYSIWYG mode isn't all that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a comment on WYSIWYG, I'd recommend opting for the browser instead. I've found that most tools that put a WYSIWYG mode into their UI end up mis-implementing parts of the rendering engine, and you end up opening 3-4 different browsers to figure out javascript and css "bugs" (more like oddities in how the browsers render code) anyway. It's convenient for simple things, but if you're doing anything sufficiently complex on the front-end, there's no substitute for good old fashioned cross browser compatibility testing.

Re:WYSIWYG mode isn't all that...

[CBung]

Yea like the people recommending Notepad++ and such, just keep a browser window open and use a refresh script or something, http://cssrefresh.frebsite.nl/

Re:WYSIWYG mode isn't all that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Dreamweaver taught me that it's better to hard-code and test it out myself (and make sure none of your code has been depreciated) and to distrust WYSIWYG editors.

Having said that, OpenBEXI HTML Builder on sourceforge seems to be fairly popular. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ob-htmlbuilder/) Haven't used it myself so I'm not sure if it meets all of your requirements/needs).

Not sure if there are any..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if there is any good alternatives. You've listed them really.

Ignore the "lolz code htmlz by yourself" people. WYSIWYG is useful in many situations.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[ByOhTek]

Silverlight targets flash, not Dreamweaver, it is a framework not dev tool - the dev tool would be Visual Studio or MonoDevelop). The former is closed source, the latter won't do what he wants.

Don't worry, I'm sure you'll recover from your lobotomy soon.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Did you even read the question?

Aptana Studio

[Anonymous Coward]

Aptana is the only IDE I've found to even come remotely close to Dreamweaver.

BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

BlueGriffon, developed by the guy who gave us Nvu is well worth a look. It's a free open source WYSIWYG HTML editor.

Re:BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

The main problem with BlueGriffon is that he's extensioned out many of what I'd consider key features and charges money for them- things like the project manager. I've a problem with that kind of thing. It's one thing to charge for things like the mobile device viewer. It's another to charge for what was a key function of the Nvu and Kompozer editors.

Re:BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me all the other editors that have a GUI combining SVG editing, HTML5 native audio and video and CSS3 transitions built-in, without needing to pay. BTW, calling extensions the wrong name when attempting to insult them shows how little you know.

Re:BlueGriffon

[webheaded]

This program didn't seem significantly different from KompoZer/Nvu to be honest. It's still kind of a mess...maybe I'll give it another shot. It HAS been a while.

Re:BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

A word of warning about BlueGriffon. Unless it has been changed in the newest version, it has a really vicious "auto-formatter" that will delete any code it doesn't recognize or cannot validate.

Re:BlueGriffon

[jensend]

There's a bigger problem there than just basic functionality (obvious things like wordcount, fullscreen mode, etc) being missing from the free of charge open source edition. If that were the only problem, I'd be happy to pay for the extensions as a way to support the project.

The trouble is that if you have basic functionality missing from an open-source project any additional developers you manage to attract will likely want to work on fixing that. Then Glazman will be in the sticky position of deciding whether to refuse patches because they compete with his add-on products or accept them anyways. If he rejects them, this will stunt the growth of a developer community and possibly end up causing a fork. If he accepts them, there goes his business model, and he may not be able to continue developing it himself. Either way, I don't think the current model makes sense for the future of the project.

Maybe either a crowdfunding ("when $X has been pledged this functionality will be added") or blender.org-style ("though it's available as closed-source payware right now, when $X has been pledged it will be open-sourced") model could work better than the current "freemium" model.

I wrote him an email about this and never got a response. I worry about the project's future.

Re:BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

A bigger problem with BlueGriffon, IMO, is that, by default, "Quick Installation (recommended)", it installs "MyStart by IncrediBar" as the default search provider, "MyStart by IncrediBar" as the home page, and "IncrediBar" itself. To disable the IncrediBar install you have to click on "Custom Installation" and remove the checkmark by each of the three installs mentioned above. I understand the need to generate income as part of his business model, but this seems underhanded, at least, and possibly a real source of trouble for people who install the program. Some people have reported having problems removing IncrediBar. See, for example, http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-360/Is-MyStart-or-Incredibar-malware/td-p/615541 , https://forums.malwarebytes.org/index.php?showtopic=104560.

Re:BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read somewhere about an interesting crowdfunding system, unfortunately I can't remember where.

There was a list of wanted features. People could donate money for any of them, in any amount, any number of times. There was a tally being kept for how much each feature had going for it. Whenever the overall sum (for all features) reached a certain threshold, the most donated-to feature would be implemented and published. Then the feature was removed from the list, a new threshold set and the thing went on.

jEdit

[Anonymous Coward]

When you render the html+css in your head, what you see is what you get.

VIM

[Lumpio-]

Or if you prefer graphical software, gvim.

waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

First person mentioning vi will get shot.

Re:waiting...

[jekewa]

Post before yours (in my stream anyway) was for VIM. I think that counts.

Re:waiting...

[Tsingi]

vim rocks.

Re:waiting...

[jekewa]

Agreed, but I think it fails as a WYSIWYG HTML editor...and, probably for the purposes of the post, it equals vi...

Re:waiting...

[Tsingi]

Agreed, but I think it fails as a WYSIWYG HTML editor...and, probably for the purposes of the post, it equals vi...

Yes, it equals vi, and in fact it is launched when you type vi. But, but, but, do you have a browser? Does it not show you the web page? Is :w, -Tab, F5 too much of a burden? Don't all of the browsers show you a total breakdown of every element in a page if there is a conflict?

I don't understand the attractiveness of WYSIWIG, it's free no matter how you work. It certainly doesn't qualify as a feature.

Re:waiting...

[jekewa]

I agree also on the WYSIWYG editing, but was commenting in context of OP. In general I do my editing in text editor and view results in a browser. Usually as many browsers as I can access (evil IE, FF, Chrome, and Safari usually suffice). Unless layout is of no concern (and that rarely happens) the browsers seem to have some quirk that messes up somethg.

Re:waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a professinal web developr, I can say with authority that using vim split screen with `watch lynx ' is the perfect WYSIWIG editor.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably gets paid per mention, even if the mention makes no sense.

Amaya

[smitty777]

You should definitely try Amaya

Re:Amaya

[Anonymous Coward]

Amaya does not support HTML5.

Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Code the page manually in Firefox using something like Firebug -- you can edit the DOM and do anything you want, and see the results instantly. That is true feedback.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[ByOhTek]

How can it? In terms of car analogies, the comparison for the GPs answer is:

Question: "Hey, I need to buy a new vehicle. I need a dealer with a good price, stands behind their warrantees, doesn't have high pressure sales people, and sells Toyotas."
GPs Answer: "I really like the Subaru Impreza."

Eclipse?

[erktrek]

I'm starting a django project and have decided to try and use Eclipse. I'm a newb with that dev platform so am not sure if it will meet all your reqs. The plugins are quite extensive though.

Re:Eclipse?

[HopefulIntern]

I would not really recommend Eclipse. I used it for a few months at my webdev job, and it was really buggy. Also, AFAIK, it does not have WYSIWYG.

Re:Eclipse?

[Tsingi]

I don't like eclipse much either, but if you want WYSIWIG, you can have it by opening your page in a browser. You know, the target client? I don't get this WYSIWIG crap.

Re:Eclipse?

[erktrek]

Thanks for the heads up!!

Will investigate this further - don't want to make a mess of a project even messier. For us wysiwyg is not all that critical. Eclipse seems to have some nice team oriented features and is (possibly) a standardized tool that can be used for django (python), straight python & postgresql dev.

There does appear to be a commercial plugin "MyEclipse" or something but that's not what was asked about I guess.

Otherwise I've used the non-wysiwyg bluefish.. I notice there's also the "Aloha Editor" - http://aloha-editor.org

Re:Eclipse?

[HopefulIntern]

Eclipse is good for plugins generally, and its integrated SVN is pretty good. Still, I saved myself a lot of rage when switching to Komodo and just using Tortoise SVN.

Re:Eclipse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse is not buggy. You might have installed a plug-in that was buggy. I don't know django so I can't comment on if using eclipse is a good fit or not. For the most part eclipse isn't that great of a match for just HTML. Now if you are doing PHP, Java or GWT then it works well.

No such animal?

[assertation]

It has been years since I checked, but I don't think there is such an animals.

Last time I asked I got pointed to html/text editors and got a pious sermon about how I didn't really need a WYSIWYG editor.

I didn't, but when the web designer for my company showed me what his work was like I was convinced that he could use a text/HTML editor, but it would take him 5 times as long to do his job.

That is the problem with the OSS community....developers working without a layer of people who are willing to listen to users to find out what they need instead of arrogantly telling them what they will find useful.

Re:No such animal?

[FictionPimp]

I couldn't imagine how you could keep your code to any real standard and keep it readable while using WYSIWYG product. On top of that, modern websites use javascript and dynamic content all of which those editors just don't handle.

A better solution is a nice theme and a nice CMS system.

Re:No such animal?

[dejanc]

I didn't, but when the web designer for my company showed me what his work was like I was convinced that he could use a text/HTML editor, but it would take him 5 times as long to do his job.

That is the problem with the OSS community....developers working without a layer of people who are willing to listen to users to find out what they need instead of arrogantly telling them what they will find useful.

Most web designers don't go near HTML/CSS. The workflow is that usually designers produce their work in Photoshop. CSS folks then produce (X)HTML/CSS templates which are later implemented into the web application / CMS. Even those designers who do both usually don't actually design in their browser.

Re:No such animal?

[lahvak]

Traditionally, people wrote free software that they themselves found useful. A developer would decide he or she does not like any existing html editors, so they would write a new one. They would release it as free software, since they were not interested in marketing it, and getting feedback and code contributions from users was more valuable for them than getting money for the product. That's how what you call OSS community works. If a developer is telling you "you don't need a wysiwyg editor", what they are really saying is "I don't need a wysiwyg editor, I believe you don't either, but if you think otherwise, go and write one." They are not being arrogant, they are trying to be helpful. You are the arrogant one, for thinking everybody has to write the software you find useful, and give it to you for free.

Re:No such animal?

[assertation]

What you wrote is true, but it left out how people from different OSS projects gripe when their software gets abandoned for software that appeals to users.

They may give a pious speech about how their software is for their own satisfaction only, but they get upset when users criticize it or abandon it for something more useful.

Re:No such animal?

[elrous0]

Anyone who thinks a non-WYSIWYG editor is as efficient as a good WYSIWYG editor should try laying out a complex table in one sometime. Sure, WYSIWYG code isn't as clean as doing it by hand, but you can't beat it as a timesaver (when your boss wants it done yesterday and doesn't give a shit whether your code is clean as a whistle or not).

Re:No such animal?

[assertation]

You are repeating a basic point I was trying to make in my comment which you replied to. I think you may have done it better.

Someone who makes only a few html files a week can afford to be an esthetic purist, scrupulously arranging tags with a text editor.

That doesn't work so well for design professional cranking out tons of screens a week.

It would be like a writer putting several magazine articles a week, while insisting on on manually putting in the MS Word or OO writer formatting tags manually, instead of kicking out content.

What OSS developers don't realize, being programmers and not designers, is that NOBODY CARES how well arranged the tags. NOBODY looks at them. Just the way people who read an authors book, the publishers etc don't look at the reveal codes from his word processor.

Re:No such animal?

[lahvak]

C'est possible. People will be people, and their random personality quirks will be, well, random. I personally never experienced that, but as they say, YMMV.

Re:No such animal?

[Saint Fnordius]

Now now, if all you are doing is static HTML for some Mom and Pop store, your point *might* be valid. But websites done for money nowadays rarely are straight HTML. All have some CMS on the server, mostly PHP or JSP, and there no WYSISYG software dares to tread. Dreamweaver is hopeless when trying to make a Drupal theme or modify a Magento web shop.

If WYSIWYG has a place, it's in letting designers crank out prototypes. One man shops are better off investing in something like Coda for Mac OS X (I know, it's not open source, but it has served me well) or Eclipse or BBEdit. That, and complex tables really should be avoided unless you are presenting an actual table. CSS layout is what matters. Relying on a WYSIWYG editor will leave your site looking clunky and bloated.

As for your assertion that no one looks at the underyling code? I do, all the time. Especially when debugging/refactoring my own. ;)

Re:No such animal?

[Geeky]

Someone who makes only a few html files a week can afford to be an esthetic purist, scrupulously arranging tags with a text editor.

That doesn't work so well for design professional cranking out tons of screens a week.

Noone should be doing that. They should be using a CMS of some sort, so that the design is configured and set once, and once only, and all they have to do is type the content in.

The designers create the layout, then either implement it or get it implemented in the CMS of choice. End content creators then come along and type up the content.

I very much doubt if the major news sites have someone cranking out new screens for every article - the content will be in a database and the system will pull it out and format the html around it when requested.

Re:No such animal?

[assertation]

Saint Fnordius;

You are completely right. The combination of CSS and CMS in modern web sites should greatly reduce the amount of tags.

That is if everyone is doing everything in a modern and common sense way. That is often not the case in professional design work or programming.

I had a job with a company that still relied on foxpro for their production deliverable. They were getting paid real money too.

Designers also make mockups, with many, MANY files. In that situation a WYSIWYG app like Dreamweaver will produce a higher quality product faster and more easily. For that purpose nobody cares how nicely the tags are arranged.

Re:No such animal?

[webheaded]

I'm going to tag a little on to this just to agree. There simply is no equivalent to Dreamweaver in OSS. Nothing holds a candle to it. I feel like I'm sounding like an Adobe salesman in this topic, but honestly...it's a really well made tool. If it worked in Linux, it would be even more perfect. I've used MANY MANY OSS tools for web development and they all kind of suck as a replacement for Dreamweaver. No, I don't want a glorified code editor. No I don't want a tool that gives me like 2 options for formatting text. I basically want Dreamweaver and that's sort of what the op needs to recognize. You don't want something like Dreamweaver...you want Dreamweaver. The interface is perfect, the code cleaner than 90% of the WYSIWYG editors out there, and the code editing window is very well done.

It really is disappointing that no one has an answer to Dreamweaver though. I've been searching for an alternative for years. Every once in a while I get a wild hair up my ass and go on another hunt and usually come up empty handed. Yes, there are some great tools out there...but they just aren't at the same level. You can't really complain though because like the other guy said...OSS developers are making the tools that they want to use. Not what you want to use.

I will say though that I'm getting tired of the snobbishness in this topic. There are uses for these editors that don't involve the user being an idiot that doesn't know how to code. I've been doing it almost 14 years and I still use the editors because they make certain things much easier and bring the whole thing together for me. Yes, I could do every single thing by hand, but that would be a waste of time. I'm not getting superior code for making tables and bolding text when I do it by hand. The people that zealously believe that are just being assholes. There are some things that you need to code by hand so that your code is not a giant shit cake, but a surprising amount of this stuff can be done rather efficiently with the GUI in Dreamweaver. It is easier to select a cell class from a drop-down than it is to remember and type in the extra " class='fancytableclass'>" into your code window. It just is. Especially since I usually do the structure of the page first and then style it afterwards.

The editors have their place for a competent web designer but they've gotten a bad name because they are easily used by people that don't know what they are doing to make very very bad looking websites. These editors are a phenomenal tool for someone that is doing coding and designing at the same time. It helps me do these things a lot quicker than I could otherwise. It's not a matter of not knowing how to code...I'm well versed in HTML and CSS...it's a matter of it doing its job well when used by people who know what they are doing.

Re:No such animal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked with the company that supplies the content creation software used by many major sites. They won't even sell that software to you unless you have 80 developers on staff - that's just for the content development and then there is a whole other set of programmers that will code shopping cart technology and other aspects of the site. Working with a company like that was very eye opening, as someone who had done web design on my own in the past.

It is simply not possible for a single designer to create anything like what those major websites do. Unfortunately, customers would like to get the same features and look for their small sites as what they see in these large sites, with no idea of the the difference in development effort required.

Re:No such animal?

[assertation]

Your post deserves to be modded up to a %

Re:No such animal?

[assertation]

To a 5!

Re:No such animal?

[AvitarX]

This is generally true.

Most have good WYSIWYG editors for content, and basic easy to mark-up themes (or good enough to use selecting a few options if you don't need anything that custom).

Though this ask /. mentions legacy ASP, so I assume the author knows something about his/her specifics I don't (anything about legacy ASP for one).

I don't know where I'd ever use a WYSIWYG editor for HTML, aside from adding articles to my established theme, but I don't edit legacy ASP applications either.

Re:No such animal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree with you here. Because of the differences in browser support for html5 and css, you absolutely must design using multiple browsers. But, I can guarantee you that if you have to maintain many separate websites as a freelancer must do, you save a tremendous amount of time making simple corrections and updates in the DW WYSIWYG view. Sure, I use BBEdit much of the time, but the code editor in DW is also quite good. They took the best pieces from Homesite (which used to be part of the program) and rolled them into the DR code editor. Code editors are certainly necessary, but for most of the updating after the site has launched I can do it much more quickly in DW. Time is literally money and the more time I save, the more money I can make.

Re:No such animal?

[Hovsep]

A capital 5!

Re:No such animal?

[GenSolo]

It would be like a writer putting several magazine articles a week, while insisting on on manually putting in the MS Word or OO writer formatting tags manually, instead of kicking out content.

A magazine article has been rendered, by the publisher, and printed onto a fixed-size page. If you're going to render your web page to a bitmap or even PDF and hand it out, I'll agree that nobody cares about the HTML. When you're presenting it to a browser to render it, you're telling me that the magazine publisher doesn't care if you turn in an article that renders properly for them in MS Word 2010; they just care that it worked for you when you designed it in Microsoft Works 4.5.

Re:No such animal?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you wrote is true, but it left out how people from different OSS projects gripe when their software gets abandoned for software that appeals to users.

They may give a pious speech about how their software is for their own satisfaction only, but they get upset when users criticize it or abandon it for something more useful.

Either you're bullshitting or stretching to the truth to try and defend and an untenable position. How do you know what developers of a project you don't use are saying? Do they phone you up late at night or do you hear them outside you windows whispering about you?

Re:No such animal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who thinks a non-WYSIWYG editor is as efficient as a good WYSIWYG editor should try laying out a complex table in one sometime. Sure, WYSIWYG code isn't as clean as doing it by hand, but you can't beat it as a timesaver (when your boss wants it done yesterday and doesn't give a shit whether your code is clean as a whistle or not).

Anyone who calls themselves a web designer shouldn't be using fucking tables in the first place.

Re:No such animal?

[Crayon Kid]

It really is disappointing that no one has an answer to Dreamweaver though. I've been searching for an alternative for years.

Maybe you should have used those years to learn HTML and CSS. By which I mean learning things like the CSS box model and being able to implement designs using a simple text editor.

Once you do that you can implement any design starting from a mockup made in whatever graphical editor you want. AND you will understand what's going on there, and be able to make stuff that's simply impossible for any HTML WYSIWYG editor ever made.

The editors have their place for a competent web designer[...]

I've never met a competent web designer. Most of them come from printing backgrounds are are incapable of understanding the most basic issue: that webpages are not print, that they're supposed to reflow and change depending on browser and user preferences, they're not a poster or a leaflet. Most of them have only vague ideas about the box model and are groping in the dark for the most part, achieving the desired effects in roundabout, non-optimal ways. Most of them have no proper knowledge of CSS or HTML and rely on the editor close to 100% to supply what they don't know.

Programmers who learn HTML and CSS do a much, much better job of it, because they're used to understanding how stuff works. Unfortunately, most of programmers don't have a high artistic ability for the design part. Plus, good programmers are much more valuable writing code, not markup.

The best compromise I've seen is having designers do mockups and programmers implement them. I've never personally met the mythical beast that combines both perfectly. Stop searching for the software version of it, it's a waste of time.

Re:No such animal?

[JasterBobaMereel]

Programmers don't use Dreamweaver, because they want to hand code the page

Professional Designers don't use Dreamweaver, because they either design the website without any HTML tools, or use a Content Management system

Amateur Designers don't use Dreamweaver, it is too expensive

It is only used by semi-professionals, and Professionals who want a quick mock-up of what the site might look like ...

There is no OSS equivilent because a) Dreamweaver exists, and does it's job very well, and b) because no-one really cares enough to bother ...

Re:No such animal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well of course i'll be unhappy if you criticize "my code" that is useful for me. Specially when you haven't contributed.

Instead of criticizing, you could've contributed code/created a fork & improved, right?

Sublime Text 2

[wholypantalones]

Design in the browser and use Sublime Text 2 it's free to use but you can buy a license and it supports most any language.

web development edition of eclipse

[jperl]

For 8 years now I use eclipse for all my web development. With additional plugins development is pretty easy and I have never ever thought of using Dreamweaver again. I am pretty sure that there will be a plugin for ASP support too.

Being a software architect...

[vikingpower]

... I have no opinion, for lack of knowledge. One of my best friends, however, regularly builds websites for advertisement campaigns. He *swears* by Dreamweaver, maintaining there is no real good replacement or alternative. And his requirement #1 is, you guessed it: WYSIWYG.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[ByOhTek]

More likely he's just a troll. I can see MS wasting money, but not like that.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in terms of car analogies, Silverlight would be more like this:

Question: "Hey, I need to buy a new vehicle. I need a dealer with a good price, stands behind their warrantees, doesn't have high pressure sales people, and sells Toyotas."

GPs Answer: "You should get a lawn mower."

Any editor + firebug

[dejanc]

I'm on the server side of web development, but HTML/CSS gurus I work with mostly use Firebug for all their WYSIWYG needs. They need to test in plethora of browsers and produce high-quality code, so relying on any individual IDE for visual design would be impossible.

That being said, maybe take a look at Komodo Edit (choice of many HTML/CSS coders I know), or figure out how zen coding works by trying it with one of the supported editors here.

P.S. What I am trying to say: if you are serious about your work, you don't need WYSIWYG. Even if you are a hobbyist, you don't need it.

Re:Any editor + firebug

[HopefulIntern]

If WYSIWYG is out as a requirement, I, too, would plug Komodo. I moved to that after a few frustrating months on Eclipse.

Re:Any editor + firebug

[Saint Fnordius]

I think you hit the nail on the head: when html authors talk of WYSIWYG editors, what they really mean is a way to do real-time tweaking of CSS, or use a console to debug the JavaScript. And even Dreamweaver pales in comparison to using Firebug.

Re:Any editor + firebug

[asylumx]

if you are serious about your work, you don't need WYSIWYG

If you are serious about getting to work, you don't need a car.
If you are serious about walking, you don't need shoes.
If you are serious about math, you don't need a calculator

Ya, it's all true, but that doesn't mean it's not useful (or even desirable).

Re:Any editor + firebug

[Crayon Kid]

Your basic idea is that "it's not needed but it helps". Guess what, WYSIWYG HTML editors don't help. They try to do both graphical editing (best relegated to an actual graphical editor) and know HTML+CSS (best relegated to a human) and make a mess of both. People who rely on them are trapped in a pathetic limbo halfway from getting either right.

Re:Any editor + firebug

[JasterBobaMereel]

If you are serious about getting to work, you need a car or public transport - not a motorised pogo-stick

If you are serious about walking, you need walking shoes, or boots - not strappy high heels

If you are serious about maths, you don't need a calculator ... you need pencil and paper, or a supercomputer (real mathematicians use only these two)

Dreamweaver is a tool, but it is not good at producing manageable code, or content managed code, which is what a good designer wants - It is good for producing a site quickly .... Quick, Well designed, maintainable - pick any 2 ...

vi

[chipperdog]

I would recommend using vi, or the graphical gvim for creating static web pages...Instead of WYSIWYG, teach structured documents - which is what HTML and CSS designed for...

Re:vi

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would you recommend people to cross the river to get water? Why recommend an inefficient tool for the job?

Does it have to be open sourced?

[carlhaagen]

Do you absolutely need this? Is it not enough if the software is free of charge and functional?

Re:Does it have to be open sourced?

[carlhaagen]

Just to elaborate on what I mean, and try not to get me wrong with this example:

"We understand that a non-muslim doctor would do the job just as good, but we really prefer that a muslim doctor treats our daughter's injury."

You see the problem here, right? My point is that maybe your priorities aren't what they should be.

Re:Does it have to be open sourced?

[Mr. Slippery]

Just to elaborate on what I mean, and try not to get me wrong with this example: "We understand that a non-muslim doctor would do the job just as good, but we really prefer that a muslim doctor treats our daughter's injury."

The Muslim-ness of a physician is irrelevant. The free-ness of software is not. If you rely on non-free software for your business, you are at the mercy of your vendor. Reliance on proprietary software is madness, though a popular madness.

Of course, reliance on a WYSIWYG tool for a medium that is inherently what-you-see-is-not-what-other-people-will-get is also a popular madness.

Re:Does it have to be open sourced?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're suffering a big misunderstanding here. open source does not mean free of charge, and free of charge does not mean open source. these two are widely different things. also, the original poster did write "free of charge and functional". don't let your "software religion" screw up your goal, people. we have enough of that bullshit in society as it is.

Re:Does it have to be open sourced?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Muslim-ness of a physician is irrelevant. The free-ness of software is not. If you rely on non-free software for your business, you are at the mercy of your vendor. Reliance on proprietary software is madness, though a popular madness.

Of course, reliance on a WYSIWYG tool for a medium that is inherently what-you-see-is-not-what-other-people-will-get is also a popular madness.

Devil's advocate viewpoint: If you don't want to be at the mercy of a vendor, create your own tool. Only you know the exact requirements you need. You won't choose the vendor if they don't provide what you need, so it would hardly be considered to be "at the vendor's mercy".

In this case, (Open source answer to Dreamweaver) is a moot point. As many have stated, if you have the skill to program, you would do far better to use an editor and the developer plugins of a browser. If you don't have that skill, open source will not make any difference since you don't have the skill to change the tool as you see fit. You could argue that you could hire someone to make the changes you need, but that also puts you at the mercy of a vendor (a vendor that is selling development time).

Quanta Plus

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

If you are using KDE, Quanta Plus might be an option: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quanta_Plus

Re:Quanta Plus

[chipperdog]

I'll second the recommendation of quanta...I use it for HTML, CSS, PHP, PERL, and C/C++ development

Re:Quanta Plus

[Fnord666]

If you are using KDE, ...

Just a guess, but I'm going to say that if the OP is looking for an alternative to Dreamweaver, he is not using KDE.

Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Notepad++ is a good option with color syntax and many many plugins but IntelliSense code is not good, but if u see for a complete ide Netbeans or NuSphere PhpEd, ok there is something to checkout http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/05/07/35-useful-source-code-editors-reviewed/

Try DreamWeaver

[Anonymous Coward]

Other than not being open source, it sounds like it has everything you want.

Blue Griffon

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Blue Griffon a bit. Not sure how much it does compared to Dreamweaver, but it has the Gecko engine built in so you'll really get what you see.
http://www.bluegriffon.org/

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[knuthin]

These are the kind of guys that make me feel ashamed to be a 7 UID person.

Web Developer Toolbar + Edit CSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I have not found WYSIWYG editors useful since I started avoiding table tags. When I need to create something I build very simple HTML and style everything with CSS. My favorite tool for this is the Edit CSS feature in the Web Developer Toolbar because the results of the edit appear as you type. It lets me experiment and quickly design CSS that works well.

How about Visual Studio Express

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to have all the things you're looking for....

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in terms of car analogies, Silverlight would be more like this:

Question: "Hey, I need to buy a new vehicle. I need a dealer with a good price, stands behind their warrantees, doesn't have high pressure sales people, and sells Toyotas."

GGPs Answer: Here, have a sandwich! It's packed full of vitamins and nutrients and it will make your belly full. Look at the nice presentation on this sandwich. It's cut into tiny triangles.

Just throwing it out there

[skurai]

Why not try Visual Web Developer? Its free, and the closest to what you're looking for in the WYSIWYG aspect. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-web-developer-express

WYSIWYG

[TheNinjaroach]

There's no such thing as a good WYSIWYG any more. Unless there's something out there that will generate previews using Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari all in the same tool, and that tool is also an IDE that you're looking for.

Find a good text editor or PHP IDE and use tools like Chrome DOM Inspector or Firebug for Firefox to tweak your CSS and view its results in real-time.

Re:WYSIWYG

[tgd]

There's no such thing as a good WYSIWYG any more. Unless there's something out there that will generate previews using Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari all in the same tool, and that tool is also an IDE that you're looking for.

Find a good text editor or PHP IDE and use tools like Chrome DOM Inspector or Firebug for Firefox to tweak your CSS and view its results in real-time.

I know its sort of taboo to mention it here, but Microsoft's Expression Studio Pro does that -- its both text, contextual and WYSIWYG editing for HTML, ASP, Silverlight, Javascript debugging, etc ... and it has a feature "SuperPreview" that does some pretty nifty things including alpha blending the results of the various browsers so you can see exactly how each browser lays things out differently. I'm not sure it does Chrome.

Anyway, its not open source, and its not cheap, but a couple hundred bucks to save that kind of time is an investment that someone doing this professionally likely would find worthwhile, unless opposed on a theistic basis. If there's one thing MS does well, its tools.

Re:WYSIWYG

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to hell for saying this... But take a look at Microsoft Expression

I tried Dreamweaver and just didn't like it. Played around with several other WYSIWYG editors and got frustrated with them crashing or making buggy code. On a whim I tried MS Expression (I was really doubtful being that is was the successor to FrontPage). I about shit myself when I tried it, it was awesome!!!

Granted, I don't do much web development, which is why I like WYSIWYG editors, but I showed it to my friends that are web developers (text editor gurus) and they dropped their jaws, they liked it!

Re:WYSIWYG

[northerner]

Depending on what you need, there is a lower cost option.

Expression Studio 4 Web Professional * Estimated Retail Price $149 USD

Expression Studio 4 Ultimate * Estimated Retail Price $599 USD

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Purchase.aspx

Re:WYSIWYG

[mcmoyer]

My WYSIWYG is vim, chrome & the live reload plugin. Edit in vim, watch the changes populate to chrome automatically. No better renderer than the browser.

Question: why?

[kiwimate]

I've been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver, and haven't stumbled upon anything that works the way I need.

You've given a couple of criteria, but the question that I think needs to be asked/answered is why are you looking for an alternative? Is it for ideological reasons, or are you hoping for a cheaper product, or does Dreamweaver not measure up somehow, or...? Knowing the answer to that question could take the discussion on a different path.

This question crops up a lot on Slashdot ("I want an open source alternative to ...") and it always generates some interesting discussions, along with mentions of products that may be new to people, and that's good. But it often seems (or is blindingly obvious) that the questioner is really just looking for an open source product "because I want to support open source". And that's fine as far as it goes, but at some point you have to go with "the best tool for the job is abc".

Depending on your context, "best" may change. For some people, the most important criterion is it's affordable. Open source sometimes meets that requirement better than closed source. But just realize that if you go for open source software just because it's open source, you may get something that's inferior in terms of feature set, ease of use, or other measures. If it's for personal use, and you're okay with that, dandy. If it's for business use, however, and you're trying to proselytize, this may not be the way to do it.

To each their own.

Just Learn...

[Kwayzu]

I taught myself HTML when I was in grade 9... its not hard, just learn it you won't regret that. I don't know how you are a PHP dev and don't know HTML. I echo out HTML lines all the time.

Re:Just Learn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I taught myself TeX at a young age, but for laying out a decent looking document for my co-workers, it is far faster to use Word.

Also I love the assumption that because someone wants to use as WYSIWG editor means that they don't know the underlying nuts and bolts rather than simply not wanting to deal with them. This is probably one reason that the Linux user experience sucks balls. The folks who use it are more interested in proving their intellectual superiority instead of getting work done.

Re:Just Learn...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also I love the assumption that because someone wants to use as WYSIWG editor means that they don't know the underlying nuts and bolts rather than simply not wanting to deal with them. This is probably one reason that the Linux user experience sucks balls.

the simple fact is that the WYS part for web development varies wildly depending on what device, program, addons, and settings you use to access a page. Consequently WYSIWIG is fundamentally impossible for web development unless you can control the devices your users use.

This is the state of Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the only two mentions of the best open source WYSIWYG editor out there are anonymous cowards, because they can't be bothered registering on a site with shrinking relevance. Ditto.

Re:This is the state of Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Its possibly less that they cant be bothered - more that the commenting system means that you lose your post if you log in after writing the comment. Seriously, for a comments system its a rather essential piece of functionality.

Re:This is the state of Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Daniel, is that you?

Perfect combination

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using Netbeans as your IDE, and Firebug for that WYSIWYG feature that you need. Just a suggestion, no ASP support though AFAIK.

Spend the $300

[elrous0]

Trust me, unless you are a die hard philosophical "open source or nothing" kind of guy, you're a lot better off spending a little money. Open source HTML/PHP editors are a goddamned mess. I've always gotten a lot better results (in that particular genre at least) by spending a little money.

Re:Spend the $300

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. http://www.kompozer.net/donate

Re:Spend the $300

[elrous0]

Kompozer doesn't remotely compare to Dreamweaver and doesn't meet the OP's specifications.

100% agree.

[oneiros27]

Anyone who thinks WYSIWYG means anything when dealing with HTML is sadly misinformed.

CSS support has gotten better, but I'd still think this classic sums it up pretty well:

http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/archive/2006/06/24/time_breakdown_of_modern_web_d/

I'd link to the original source (http://poisonedminds.com), but the URL no longer works.

Re:100% agree.

[Anonymous Coward]

WYSIWYG is extremely important, just not for the reason the original poster cited. I use the WYSIWYG feature all the time for basic content entry on a web page. For example, when I need to create a nested bulleted list it is much faster to do it in the WYSIWYG editor vs. having to hand type all those

• and
• 's by hand.

Here is the list

[Anonymous Coward]

http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/

Quite a few alternatives or partial alternatives

How about NVU?

[jkyrlach]

It will never be Dreamweaver (I don't think anything free ever will be) but it tries. I will echo above opinion that as great as Dreamweaver is, the html/css that it generates is horrible inefficient, the only worse one i know is Microsoft's WYSIWYG. Once you have done it enough, you can be quite fast as HTML/css from scratch in a text editor. Let us know what you pick and why. http://net2.com/nvu/

It's not at all what he's asking, but here it goes

[eldavojohn]

SilverLight. They technology behind it stunning. You can also use C# to developed. For video sites there's also a HUGE difference compared to flash - with SilverLight the client and server will adjust to the available bandwidth the user has.. in flash this would just show up the loading icon and stop playing. SilverLight is technically much better than Flash.

Makita. They power drills let me build anything. So why not web sites? You can also use your hands to use them. For tables built with power drills there's also a HUGE difference compared to hammers - with Makita the carpenter and sitter will adjust to how quickly they can drill.. with a hammer this would just show up as unfinished nailheads sticking out on the surface. Makita is technically much better than a hammer.

*picks up his fat paycheck from Makita* Welp, my work here is done.

SeaMonkey Composer

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried SeaMonkey Suite with SeaMonkey Composer? It has a nice WYSIWYG editor and at least some of the things you are looking for.

Re:SeaMonkey Composer

[smitty777]

I've tried this pretty successfully in the past. The only problem is that it has trouble with CSS and some of the newer technologies sometimes. Not always that easy to work with.

Re:It's not at all what he's asking, but here it g

[Yvan256]

Dear eldavojohn,

we also make hammers now. Your paycheck has been cancelled.

Signed,
Makita.

Blue Griffon

[Anonymous Coward]

What about http://bluegriffon.org/ ?

Basically

[cshark]

The only real reason to use Dreamweaver is because it's far and away the best css editor on the market, in my opinion. It has a lot of asp/php code generation in it, but you're not going to find that anywhere. There was a code generator called Codecharge that was pretty good, had the code generation, but I didn't like the wysiwyg on it. If you want a pretty good css editor, there's Amaya from the W3c. It's clunkier than Dreamweaver, but it uses a lot of the same parts. If you like the css editor in Dreamweaver, you'll find the wysiwyg and css editor in Amaya workable, but you don't want to put anything other than markup into it. I wouldn't put php code in Amaya. As far as source code editors: Netbeans is still my favorite source code editor. It's better than Dreamweaver, and more powerful than Eclipse, in my opinion. Good luck on the transition.

BlueGriffon

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at BlueGriffon. It's powered by Gecko (the Firefox engine) and has support for new(er) HTML5 form tags, etc. It's a relatively young application, but it's coming along nicely.

Designers should code, or at least know how to

[Anonymous Coward]

A web designer should know how to code, should know the nuances of CSS, and should know what load times mean.

WYSIWYG = local web server

[jduhls]

Use Notepad++ and have a web server running on your local machine. Code, refresh, code, refresh. Dreamweaver was a dead-end evolutionary branch of web development.

Focus on the tool, not OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously; why does it have to be open source software?

If you're developing with PHP and a slice of ASP, as such also aiming for Microsoft environments then why not get their Expression Studio 4 Web professional ?

First its affordable; hardly as expensive as Dreamweaver is. Second; it allows for some "WYSIWYG"-like editing but focuses on using an editor where you can get a good view of what your result is going to look like. Third; it ships with a graphical editor. Not as extensive as Gimp or Photoshop, but its very usable for getting contents ready for the web.

And the feature I like best is the option to check up on how your webpage will look like in different browsers. Obviously all strains of their Explorer but they also included support for Firefox and Safari as well. Make no mistake here; its fully using the engine of the browser to render the page. Even allows you see the differences side by side.

It supports HTML, PHP, and obviously ASP as well. Granted; its not open source and also not freely available. But why does that have to be a requirement if all you want is get a job done?

vim

[Anonymous Coward]

vim

Slashdot blinders

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck asking this sort of question on Slashdot. Almost all of these responses evade the question. "You don't need it", be a real programmer type responses aren't helpful, useful or warranted. If you need a WYSIWYG editor, for whatever reason, and want an viable alternative to Dreamweaver, open source, you're pretty much out of luck. I clicked the suggestions given (for those who weren't completely dismissive) and guess what, every one of those (except the one based on Firefox, which looked like a reasonable start) showed a screenshot with the code editor window open. Whatever the actual capabilities are, these aren't applications geared toward the audience that would be served by a WYSIWYG editor.

I too would love to deploy a working open-source WYSIWYG editor instead of proprietary solutions from Adobe or Microsoft, but sadly, there is no one willing to serve that need. In a world where say, Gimp, didn't exist, and the question was about Photoshop, most of your responses are in the format of, well geez, why don't you just use ImageMagick, then, hey what are you using JPG for, it's lossy, just open vim (no use Emacs) and you can make your own X pixmaps all day long. (i.e. complete ignorance about what need is being served by these tools, or how a busy user might benefit by the removal of a layer of abstraction.)

It's already been said

[james_van]

but it bears repeating - WYSIWYG IS BAD. Learn to write HTML, it's very easy. I know, I know, I'm bordering on flamebait here, but I'm gonna say it anyway. And I'll readily admit that Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG helped me quite a bit when I was learning HTML, but most editors that use WYSIWYG have quirky implementations and don't render quite the way a real browser will. I ended up spending more time troubleshooting and digging through generated code trying to make things work than I would have it I had just sucked it up, put on my big boy pants and wrote my own code. It's fine for a beginner as a tool to help learn, but nothing more. If you have a dual monitor setup, open a browser on one screen and the editor (if you insist on open-source, I recommend Notepad++) in the other, and every time you make a change in the editor, hit refresh in the browser. I promise, if you take the time to learn HTML properly and invest a little time and energy up front, it will be well worth it in the end. --Potential DBag comment-- I own a small web dev shop, if you walked in and applied (even as a "designer") and you couldn't hand code basic HTML/CSS and needed a WYSIWYG editor to do your work, I would drop your resume in the trash on the spot. I don't expect designers to be code masters, but in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason why a designer shouldn't be able to take their images and turn them into decent HTML. --End DBag comment--

Re:It's already been said

[Anonymous Coward]

It is no longer cost effective for a company to pay a developer to tweak html by hand anymore; it is far more productive to pay developers to write the algorithms on the back end and have designers create the front end using WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver. As for professionals not using WYSIWYG tools; that statement is just silly. If a large number of developers did not use the tools, Adobe, Microsoft and others would not spend millions of dollars developing the software. It's the professionals that pay big bucks for these tools, not the home hobbyist. Although the WYSIWYG tools are not perfect, it can be argued that most hand written code is not either. And while Dreamweaver does add a lot of unnecessary markers to the code, not all WYSIWYG tools suffer from this problem. For example, FlashBuilder generates an .mxml file that is exactly the same as if it was coded by hand... in about 1/25th the time.

However, I do agree that the use of a WYSIWYG environment does not mean the developer should not have a good understanding of HTML, CSS and whichever scripting language you are using.

Re:It's already been said

[Imazalil]

Yes WYSIWYG is bad for generating final code. But, honestly, for non-CMS sites, I still find it much easier to have Dreamweaver with code/wysiwyg side by side, so I can quickly click on the element of a page I need to edit (type, replace image, etc) and go right into the code to do make the edit. Yes, it only saves a second or two of scanning html code, but that adds up over time. Some programs have created tree view/lists to mimic this - Code Navigator in Coda for example - but it's just not the same.

The other thing that I haven't found a replacement for is the library items/assets. Create your Navigation or Footer and then apply it to all pages of your site, links to images etc are updated as required depending on the page and how deep in the site structure it is. Lots of other programs have code snippets, but I haven't found one that will update links like this.

Obviously, both these things are not going to be required when dealing with CMS sites.

Re:It's already been said

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry. Some of us just aren't programmers. I love working WYSIWYG first, and THEN tweaking whatever needs tweaking. I know, I know... Everything should be CSS and dynamic these days, but sometimes I just want to make a damn table-based layout for a single static page. I hate writing code from scratch. Give me a skeleton of code, and I'll add on to it and modify it like a mofo.

That's just me though, and I'm a visual person.

Another vote against WYSIWYG

[Anonymous Coward]

While I DO have Dreamweaver at the office, I myself don't use the WYSIWYG portion of it. I have a dev server running that I do all my visual testing on, and do the rest of my coding by hand. I've developed sites for smaller individuals as well as larger clients, such as hospitals. At home I use Geany, and find it's code editor to be superb (and the console integration in the Linux version makes it almost completely unnecessary to alt-tab away from the software).

What you might want to consider is adjusting your workflow; mine works like this:
Mockup in Photoshop
Export graphics, get dimensions and colors
Write template files (just the XHTML)
Write stylesheets
Test templates to ensure layouts are golden
Split out templates into PHP files (or whatever else you're using) for includes
Code back end, working from files loaded onto dev server, and test.
Then, go live.

I've been doing web design/dev for approximately 11 years now. When I started I did use Dreamweaver's IDE and WYSIWYG editor for stuff such as tables, but eventually (about 8 years ago) I made the switch to hand coding everything. Once I got comfortable with it, I found that I was working MUCH faster. It helps if you attempt to visualize your markup while you're doing mockup. Also, ensure that you're only using tables to display tabular data (if it makes sense to put it into a spreadsheet, then it makes sense to put it into a table, typically). Tables for layout create unnecessary headaches and can slow development time down significantly; Good CSS markup can accomplish pretty much anything with a fraction of the code, also reducing load time.

I myself can code the layout for a moderately sized site in a day, typically. The two slowest parts for me tend to be mockup (waiting for inspiration to hit) and content migration (fighting with clients to get content). Also, I don't code the site until I get signed approval for the mockup, to avoid wasting time redoing a layout. Minor tweaks obviously aren't an issue, but many clients have a hard time understanding what's minor and not (not their fault, but a headache none-the-less).

Hopefully this helps. If not, feel free to ignore my ramblings and keep soliciting more advice :)

BlueGriffon

[PineHall]

BlueGriffon is another editor that does HTML5, CSS3, SVG, and MathML. It is also extendable. Not exactly what you are looking for but what you want may not exist. Anyway you might want to check out BlueGriffon too.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[isopropanol]

I just read over your comment history because of the stalking accusation in the OpenStreetmap threads, and this suggestion does not jibe with your earlier comments regarding Chrome. You rail against one company's non-standard single-browser content plugins as breaking the web, then suggest using another company's. There is some hypocricy there.

Get a professional tool

[pz]

Open source is great. I use open source tools whenever possible, but only up to a point. My productivity is more important, because, ultimately, that is what my livelihood, and my family's well-being, is based upon. When a professional-grade open source tool is available, I'll use it preferentially. I'll even *buy* it or make contributions to the developer.

Now, in my experience, Adobe makes excellent products. Really, quite very excellent, and the open-source alternatives are far behind. When I'm still at a level for some task where I'm just screwing around, then open-source grade tools are fine. When I've risen to the level of getting paid for doing that task, and Adobe's asking $300 for a tool that will radically increase either my productivity or the quality of my work product, or both, then that's money well spent (and, depending on circumstance, also a tax deductable expense in the US). Heck, $300 is only a fraction of a billable day. For a highly useful tool? That's an expense hardly worth debating.

Just buy Dreamweaver. If you're being cheap, then find a used copy that's one version old (ie, CS4) on eBay or Craigslist, and somehow justify the extra time to buy that rather than just ordering Dreamweaver immediately.

Re:Get a professional tool

[daniel23]

Adobe products may be great but Adobe's Linux support is not. So it's either running windows versions of the Adobe products in vm s or looking for OSS replacements for us folks who actually switched to Linux on the desktop. Thus your point is moot.

Re:Quanta Plus... is dying

[JoeCommodore]

Unfortunately Quanta Plus is dying from neglect. the current full version 3.5 was coded for KDE3 and as of Ubuntu 11.10 has been dropped from ther repositories.

Quanta 4 has been locked in development beta for years with out much support to bring what is done out in a stable form. And also it is not the same Quanta as 3 as it has become a module of the Kdevelop4 platform, so I am unsure whether WYSIWYG support still exists.

Yeah, I too really like Quanta Plus, but whit it becoming harder to get with new Linux distributions I have to look for alternatives. What I would like to see is someone update 3.5 to work with 4 libraries, because it had so much great functionality and features.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Quiet_Desperation]

But, but, but you can also use C# to developed!

Notepad (or similar) + Chrome

[Barryke]

You could even edit your source live inside chrome, if you want.
Its not drag and drop, but for me thats not an issue as the actual layout is CSS (which is NOT drag & drop) and Images (which are provided as URLS to CSS).

I still don't understand what good Dreamweaver is to people besides designers that can not (or do not want to) program.
I am not trolling and would love some serious replies: i believe so firmly what i said in this post, i wonder what i forgot that other people want!?

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[LifesABeach]

SilverLight is your solution? This explanation is going to take about 3 beers. m$ doesn't even support it on its browser. As for being an IDE, I was thinking of Eclipse, which is what Aptana, and Bluefish call, "Daddy."

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[g0bshiTe]

6, do I hear a 5?

FrontPage

[Anonymous Coward]

You should totally use MicroSoft FrontPAge! It's the latest, most standard complient WISIWIG HTML editor out there. I use it to update all my corporate site that use ASP, ASP.NET, Rails, Grails, JSF, PHP, ZXP, VSP, YYP, NOP, etc. The code editor is second to none, and the WYSIWYG editor makes use of the only browser that matters: IE6.

You won't dissapoint with FronPAge, I swear.

Re:FrontPage

[Outtascope]

AC sux at the HTML.

Re:FrontPage

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't have to the HTML because i have 133t hax0r skill with the fRONTpAGE!

WYSIWYG can be useful

[Anonymous Coward]

i work with DW and it's useful when tweaking old pages that use a lot o tables and aren't worth the trouble to redesign. you can get to the table element quickly, just by clicking on it on the WYSIWYG section. instead of looking for it exclusively on code.

SHHHHHHH!

[DeathToBill]

Wow. Just wow. You've found a way to simultaneously make enemies of both sides of the vi/emacs holy war.

Or should we be modding this flamebait, in the truest sense?

The best answer:

[Errol backfiring]

"NO". And I hereby put this answer in the public domain.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

0, do I hear -1?

no

[unity100]

The coders like to call these more static, design-oriented sites "less professional" because they clearly weren't hand-coded, and the HTML source is typically a big mess.

coders dont call these less professional because they are static. they call these less professional because what a wysiwyg editor produces have a much lower chance of appearing properly as intended in many browsers across many devices/platforms.

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[LWATCDR]

I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person...
I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement.
NVU http://net2.com/nvu/
Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus
Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/
Hope this helps the original poster.
Oh and if you just want free as in beer.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express
I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.

It depends what you want to do

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the best Editors I found is PHP Storm by JetBrains

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[morari]

I'm pretty sure that a Subaru would fit all of those requirements... outside of being a Toyota. No one really wants a Toyota, though.

bullshit.

[unity100]

actually div/css designs have a lot of floatiness when put against different browser/os/device platforms. a lot. you have to be extra extra careful with these so nothing will fly about. even big companies are not immune from that, as evidenced by the person who complained about yahoo video windows flying about in a particular browser.

tables have one major advantage - they are OLD, and all browsers implement them the same way they were implemented since more than a decade. and, tables DO stay where you put them, how you put them, as you put them. including what is inside them. there is no way that they will display any unaccounted for characteristic if you define their full parameters. coupled, these two advantages make tables a major lifesaver in stuff that needs to look same across platforms. in fact, leave aside new areas like smartphones, tablets etc, i have used tables numerous times to fix even issues that ie was generating. (you should know how intricate, shitty and dogged they were until recently).

that is what i like about tables : they will stay put where they are, as they put, and will do the same in all browsers/platforms, REGARDLESS of what else does what. you can do the same thing with divs, but, when you implement such a format, you div ends up as a table, and all the difference you have made ends up using div instead of table tags. and divs can even get interpreted differently across browsers even in that state, with hardcoded, fixed parameters. (mostly microsoft)

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[kelemvor4]

I'm pretty sure that a Subaru would fit all of those requirements... outside of being a Toyota. No one really wants a Toyota, though.

Nor a Subaru.

Hand code

[Anonymous Coward]

Leaving the wysiwyg world and hand coding was the best decision I ever made in my carreer. The tools are free, I only build the website once and I'm not held back by the limitations of my editor.

None of the well known and respected web designers depend on wysiwyg. Cutting edge techniques aren't available in those tools. There's no space for innovation. My company won't even interview you if you don't hand code. Wysiwyg is a learning tool and it's where most of us start. But it's not for pro's who make a carreer out of the web.

Alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver that are Free

[Anonymous Coward]

Quanta Plus has has an excellent reputation for many years but unfortunately does not get a great deal of press

  It is my understand that this Wev development environment is very productive for far more than KDE, including
Python, Rails, PHP and more.

http://quanta.sourceforge.net/release2.php

Re:Alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver that are Free

[daniel23]

This a joke, right? The links goes to an age-old doc annoncing Quanta Plus 2.0 and the roadmap for future development mentions coming support for KDE 2.2

Anybody check OSALT?

[CCarrot]

I don't know if I've seen this site posted here before, but has anybody checked the Open Source Alternatives site, www.osalt.com? Sure, they're not always totally up-to-date, but the do accept software suggestions if your favourite application is missing from the list...

They also only identify open source alternatives, not freeware alternatives (e.g., Paint.NET is not listed as an alternative to Photoshop, since it is simple freeware now and no longer open source). This can be a good thing or an annoying thing, depending on your goals (I use Paint.NET because it's a helluva program, despite not being OS any longer, and the user base/plugin support is amazing).

From the Dreamweaver page, alternative options include:
Quanta Plus 3.5
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
For quick and effortless web development - Quanta Plus is steadily becoming a worthwhile competitor to the commercial web editors on the market. Quanta Plus's features include multi-document... Read more
Aptana 2
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Aptana is an html/javascript editor, however, it does not provide any WYSIWYG feature - but it is still an amazing editor with many advanced features. Aptana is intended for people developing dynamic... Read more
Bluefish 1.0
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Eventhough Bluefish is not a WYSIWYG editor - it is still considered a strong tool, however, mainly for experienced web developers/designers. Has support for unicode - and provides wizards for -... Read more
Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.0
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
SeaMonkey settles all of your internet application needs in own package. Its a web-browser, email and newsgroup client, HTML authoring program and IRC chat client all-in-one. In most areas -... Read more
Amaya 10
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Amaya, developed by W3C, is a web editor/browser that creates and updates documents directly on your website. W3C (WWW Consortium) needed a framework that could include as many of their technologies... Read more
Nvu 1.0
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Nvu is a web development system primarily developed for Linux but is now also available for windows and mac. The project aims to be an open source alternative for the major commercial web authoring... Read more
KompoZer 0.7.7
Available for: windows mac linux unix java
Kompozer is an open source web development tool built on NVU. The project strives to fix bugs in the NVU project and added new features to it. Both the HTML editor as well as the CSS editor has so... Read more

Re:Anybody check OSALT?

[timothyf]

Another place to look that I've used in the past is AlternativeTo:
http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/?license=opensource

Seems like the OP could stand to learn some googling skills.

Re:Anybody check OSALT?

[CCarrot]

Another place to look that I've used in the past is AlternativeTo:
http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/?license=opensource

Seems like the OP could stand to learn some googling skills.

Oooh, it seems it's been quite a while since I checked out AlternativeTo...developer's done some really nice work there!

Last time I checked it out it looked like some high school student's homework project, with links to software they liked. There was some cross-comparison of alternatives, if I recall correctly, but it didn't seem very comprehensive or user-friendly...I don't know, I found osalt and simply tended to use that instead when looking for new toys to play with :)

Looking at the AlternativeTo site now, though...sexy, very sexy. Filters by platform and license, doesn't snub commercial or freeware versions (for some stuff I do prioritize performance over license, although I use OS where possible...luckily in a lot of cases the OS alternative is also the performance winner!), and seems fairly comprehensive on quick overview.

As I said, nice work done there! Thanks for bringing me back to it!

Re:Anybody check OSALT?

[CCarrot]

Looking at the AlternativeTo site now, though...sexy, very sexy.

Gawddammit! Epic fail: the blasted site uses that OpenID crapfest! Can't create a local account, must use Google or FB or some such to log in. Fartbubbles, I hate sites like that! I don't even have a FB account, and they're sure as hell not getting anything on my google profile...

Oh well. It's still a useable site, I guess, I just would have liked to have been able to vote up some long-time favourites...bah, humbug.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[GameboyRMH]

Look at the FR-S (AKA GT-86), the chassis is built by Subaru and it's a Toyota. If you don't at least find it interesting you're probably a soccer mom :-P

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah this guy's most likely a troll, same guy as SharkLaser and DCTech I'd guess.

Content Management System

[tobiah]

Sounds like you might want a content management system like Drupal or Joomla. Those are big, well-supported and widely used. Classic asp support exists, but I don't know how good it is. Haven't used those features myself.

There's nothing very good

[Animats]

Dreamweaver used to be excellent until the CSS clowns went and mucked up HTML. Dreamweaver 3 really was WYSIWYG, worked on pure HTML, and didn't require knowing HTML. Dreamweaver today has a display window and an HTML window, and you need to work in both, plus fuss explicitly with CSS values in other windows. It's still quite useful.

In the post-CSS era, almost nobody has decent round-trip HTML editors. Instead, we have "content management systems" which generate bad HTML in bulk, and can't read what they write. This is the main source of web page bloat.

The open source alternatives listed are far worse. I've tried Nvu. They had the right idea, but couldn't keep up with the changes to HTML. Also, there's a difference between an single-page HTML editor and something like Dreamweaver, which manages files for the whole site.

Re:There's nothing very good

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't understand why CSS exists and is a good thing, web development is not for you. Same with programming. Stick with pixel manipulation.

We have a bunch of people who are way smarter than you (or I) working on this HTML/CSS thing. If you think what they do sucks, you are actually welcome to enlighten them, but more probably you're just an idiot who denigrates what he doesn't understand.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Columcille]

Hello from a fiver.

NVU

[Goodyob]

NVU.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[azalin]

agreed

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[Outtascope]

Dude, I scanned that list and saw "Microsoft" and "2010" in the same sentence and had the shitscare that they were resurrecting Frontpage... Frontpage + Geocities: A match made in heaven.

Brings me back to the days of violent cyan on olive drab with animated snowflake gifs and blinky text all over the web (making me wish Compuserve was more successful in getting all infringing images pulled). I think I need a Tums.

Ew

[Anonymous Coward]

Who uses the display-mode of WYSIWYG editors anyway?

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Anonymous Coward]

But the requirements weren't for a car, they were for a dealer...

Ug... Dreamweaver broke the interwebs

[Outtascope]

Anytime I see that Dreamweaver anchor image, I want to punch a baby in the mouth.

VIM

[Bertrand Wilmot]

VIM.

My Browser is my WYSIWYG

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using a WYSIWYG editor, beware. Unless your WYSIWYG can show you what your code looks like in all browsers, you're not saving yourself any effort.

If you're using a WYSIWYG simply because you can't code HTML, then consider reading a book on the subject.

Seriously.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[The Psyko]

Silverlight does not target Flash, it targets the Silverlight runtime.

Emacs...

[kruhft]

..or Vi, whatever floats your boat.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[thetoadwarrior]

Hey astroturfer, silverlight is not an IDE.

Managing compromise

[jago25_98]

Seeing discussions of WYSIWYG verses raw coding prompts me to ask,

from a project design point of view,
    what are some good methods to have various ways of generating code cohabitate?

From the comments in this thread I see different ways of design:

- Some arrange CSS as design and use a WYSIWYG tool for that, but code html content by hand and leave it at that.

- Other people use photoshop for mock-ups and then get a team to make-it-so.

- another way I've seen here is using CMS and then trying to tweak those ContentManagementSystems

- the other thing about WYSIWYG is that it can help with visualising the overall project more quickly. You might also use something like Dreamweaver to do something specific on a handcoded site that would otherwise be a lot of work

How do take the advantages of each of these kinds of approach and get them to mesh efficiently?
    If one doesn't use a CMS then we have to have our own methodology.

It reminds me of when I first met a professional musician. We both had sample libaries but somehow his system worked so much better for him than mine did for me. Same for photographers too.
In the same way what I'm looking for is to learn from the professionals how to organise development in addition to learning things like html5 which I'm out of date on. What are the resources for this?

Re:Managing compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the method used is less important than the tools. As long as you dont repeat yourself and dont re-invent the wheel, you usually have a workable outcome.

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[kesuki]

why has no one mentioned a combo of Seamonkey and other foss html tools. seamonkey provides the wysiwyg editor of the former netscape suite. if not good enough on it's own pairing it with some other tools is usually the way open source goes, one app for one part of the process, and another app for another part.

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[Anonymous Coward]

They did resurrect Frontpage, it's called Expression Web now

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[tjhart85]

A Subaru is a dealership now?

Not WYSIWYG - Live Reload

[Squiggle]

I recommend against WYSIWYG editors and instead work with tools that provide "live reload", refreshing your page in the browser without hitting the refresh button. Google for it but there are plugins and and bunch of projects on github for various editors and frameworks.

For editors, my personal choice is Sublime: http://www.sublimetext.com/ But Redcar http://redcareditor.com/ was a runner up and I used to use Eclipse.

Re:Not WYSIWYG - Live Reload

[Eponymous Hero]

i agree with this point. from an engineering perspective, the root of your problem is that you want a WYSIWYG editor. eliminate that desire and start window shopping for an IDE instead. your editor should be providing productivity advantages to you via code helpers, not code generators. if you think WYSIWYG tools are important for design, you're doing it wrong.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Firefalcon]

Hello from a 4. ;-)

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[thomst]

LWATCDR posted:

I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person... I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement. NVU http://net2.com/nvu/ Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/ Hope this helps the original poster. Oh and if you just want free as in beer. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.

Good of you to actually address the OP's question. However:

NVU - only useful for sites hosted by the program's vendor.

Quanta Plus - only runs on Linux (DW is a Mac/Windows application).

Amaya - hasn't been updated since 2009, and it's utterly broken in many respects (can't cut-and-paste tables, for instance).

Blue Griffon - shows promise. I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it works, but at least it's currently under development. Otoh, it's still in beta, it's "free to download" - which means they plan to charge some unknown amount for the commercial release version - and it has a bunch of add-ons that are NOT free, and do not appear to be OS.

Visual Web Studio Express - is a Windows application. OP may well be working in a Mac environment. Also, resulting HTML is likely bloatacious and nearly impossible to hand-tune.

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[butalearner]

I agree with but since no one seemed to have any answers for this person... I have not used these but they seem to be options a Dreamweaver replacement. NVU http://net2.com/nvu/ Quanta Plus http://freecode.com/projects/quantaplus Amaya http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ Blue Griffon http://bluegriffon.org/ Hope this helps the original poster. Oh and if you just want free as in beer. http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express I have used any of them but out of this is you will probably find something that will fill the bill.

I hadn't heard of Blue Griffon, so I looked it up and found that it is made by the same guy who made Nvu all those years ago. Nvu hasn't been updated for over 6 years, so as a result the community forked it and it became KompoZer. Now, though, KompoZer hasn't been updated in almost 2 years. The other options don't appear to be faring much better on the release front. It looks like Blue Griffon might be the way to go at the moment.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[ryanov]

Low 5's good enough for me.

Vim

[Anonymous Coward]

Spend a day learning the basics of Vim use and you'll never go back unless you happen to like clunky interfaces in which case you may be the Emacs sort. Just a personal observation, but programmers who get into Dreamweaver and the like, generally suck at programming, partly due to use of that kind of software.

It's not free but hey, it's damn good

[Anonymous Coward]

Coda
http://panic.com/coda/

re: lower chance of appearing properly

[King_TJ]

Maybe ... but where do you draw the line? When I was trying to build a fairly "full featured" personal web site, many years ago, I fought with these issues. I'd design something only to discover it didn't format the way I liked when the user had certain versions of Netscape, vs. Internet Explorer, or a piece of javascript didn't make a button change color on mouse-over with OS/2's browser, or ??

After all these years and attempts at standardization, we still see the exact same problems today. I don't think it's ever going to end, as long as companies or organizations out there feel they can offer something beneficial in their browser that "the competition doesn't do yet". There's always going to be that assumption that their new idea is so good and will be so well received, the competitors will "just have to play catch-up and add it too". Of course, they often don't .....

It doesn't make your site "less professional" if you define a scope and say, "Look. We know statistically, the VAST majority of viewers are going to come to use using Internet Explorer 7 or later, a recent version of Firefox, or either an iOS device or Android device, on the mobile side of things." Test your results with those options and if it looks good, call it a done deal. You'll pull your hair out trying to make anything but the most basic of pages look consistent on all the potential combinations. (Craigslist does it, but that's NOT the look most business are going to pay for, when they want an online presence!)

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[PwnzerDragoon]

You guys all laugh, but go try to fill out a job application at Subway's web site. You'll be taken to a web site built entirely in Silverlight. Yes, it takes over the entire client area of the browser and even supplies its own scroll bar. I don't normally like to throw around terms like "epic fail", but I'm finding it difficult to come up with another way of describing my feelings when I saw it.

Firebug

[Anonymous Coward]

When I used to do web development I would do a basic page layout with plain html, open it in firefox and use Firebug to customize everything, then when it was good enough I would move to the CSS file. from my experience with dreamweaver this aproach is even better since it does not render exactly the way firefox does.
There are some add-ons for firebug that make it even better, like the Firepicker wich adds a color picker for color values and I believe there is an enhanced auto-completion for CSS too. Plus I would use it for java script too, though the console is a little limited.

For the php any minimally good text editor should do.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[bsd_usr]

I think it's pretty hot! Rear wheel drive 4 banger? Interesting indeed. The only thing that kills me is the puny 2.0L engine.

I'd like to take it for a test drive when it comes out though. Seems like it would be a fun car to drive.

Been doing it this way since 1993

[multimediavt]

I have tried every text editor decked out with bells and whistles (including DW) since I started hand coding HTML in NotePad and SimpleText back in 1993. Yeah, I did some in vi and emacs, too.

TO THIS DAY and I mean five minutes ago when I stopped coding to eat I still use a simple line numbering and code-aware text editor (currently TextWrangler) to do 99.9% of my coding. I say that because coding tables is a pain in the arse by hand and I will cheat and use something else to at least set those up. I then have at least two different browsers open, several file folders and a SFTP client or shell window open to scp files to a server. My WYSIWYG is just that. Always reliable because I am looking at it in Firefox and Safari initially, then once that code is stable I boot my Windows VMs and test those browser versions. All while the workflow rolls from editor to Finder to CyberDuck to browser (love me some FireBug, and the Chrome page inspector ain't bad either), repeat as necessary. Versioning would be nice, and the integrated file management in some of the for-pay editors like DW and BBEdit are really nice, but versioning is still klunky.

I do add some time to my project dev the way I work, but I am used to it and have gotten smooth. My code always works, most of the time with very minor tweaks for cross browser compatibility. A WYSIWYG editor for the web is a pipe dream loaded with the best hash in the world. Web standards are too much of a moving target, let alone figuring out which browser supports what! Forget it. You're gonna have multiple browsers open, and you're gonna be reloading...a lot! Now, the editor environment, debugging (in browser linked to editor, mind you), versioning, and file transfer and management in one app along with his other non-pipe dream specs exist. Sure, most have some bloat, but that's what you get when you move from the component world to the all-in-one stereo. A bunch of extra crap you didn't really need.

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[LWATCDR]

Okay how about Kompozer and Bluefish
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html
and http://kompozer.net/

My experiance

[AlanBDee]

Since I've been a professional web developer for around 8 years I'll share what I have been doing. First, do your design in Photoshop or similar program. Once you learn how to use it it'll be much faster. I used Dreamwearer from version 4 to CS3 and rarely used the WUSIWYG editor. It always caused more trouble then it was worth. I've been using Eclipse or Netbeans since I migrated to Linux.

The reason I don't use a WUSIWUG editor is because I generate most my HTML using PHP factory classes. To the "generate a 7x9 table table in 5 seconds" I do one better and simply throw the data into a datagrid class and it renders everything from sorting to paging. That's how it's done folks. API's such as that are usually part of frameworks like cakePHP, Yii, Zend, Drupal. Once learned are your biggest time saver.

As for page layout I do that in any editor I'm using and test it in various browsers. After some time and experience you'll learn what CSS works and what doesn't on all browsers. First I try to get my base CSS to work, if it fails on IE6 (which is common) as a last resort I'll edit a specific CSS file that is only used for IE6.

There are also front-end testing frameworks that are designed to find and detect issues with different browsers, but I haven't used them.

In the end, if you can't find an open source solution to anything related to development your approaching your problem wrong. I attest that Eclipse and Netbeans are some of the best tools because they were built by developers for developers. If an open source solution seems to be missing, there's a reason.

jEdit - Programmer's Text Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

I've asked myself the same question for years.

The answer is jEdit (jedit.org). With BufferTabs and ProjectViewer plugins, this gives exactly an ide feeling.
And yes, it support asp (vbscript) syntax highlighting (out of many others)

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[mwvdlee]

I agree.
Trying to apply for a job at Subway is an epic fail.

Slashdot was the wrong place to ask.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think /. is not the place ot ask such kind of questions. I would go to Reddit, Y-combinator or other less snobby forum.

I see Dreamwever to design as Eclipse/Netbeans to programming. Both tasks can be achieved using notepad.exe of course, but the *reason* to use an IDE (design, IDE or development IDE) is because such software understands the /semantics/ of the stuff (code) people is creating.

All the whining I read in slashdot commens are equivalent to people whinning that Eclipse adds a lot of code with the refactoring functions or modifies the text with the "automatic formatting function". Just because people don't know how to use the tool.

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[JumperCable]

NVU has been replaced by Kompozer http://kompozer.net/ It isn't perfect but it is what I use right now.

FrontPage

[Anonymous Coward]

You should really check out FrontPage. The .htm's it generates are also completely compliant to open standards.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[Lefty2446]

^ as well...

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[garatheus]

I actually quite like the Microsoft Expression (I only have studio 2 though) as it's fairly competent as an IDE (and has support for a couple of languages). I only really used it for the syntax highlighting and some code complete... These days though, I only really use Aptana Studio... And just hand craft the code (HTML5, woop). I liked the old version of Zend Studio (version 5... I don't like Eclipse-based stuff thanks to having to work with RAD and RSA, thanks IBM) as it made it fairly easy to see the different classes / methods you were working with while programming. Debugging also seemed to work better (maybe I'm just doing it wrong in Eclipse, meh, I don't like it), of course, you'd also have to hand-code the HTML too (don't be lazy).

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[RockDoctor]

Depends on how low you want to go.

Notepad++ and PHP Eclipse

[marcpires]

I'm the one that posted the question, before signing up on /. Thank you all for the feedback. I agree that WYSIWYG is not that important, but it makes my job easier, tweaking old pages of projects from others that overuse tables and such. Looking for the right or othe elemment is easy this way. I'm way too tired of working w/ DW, and was looking for open source options, to apply here at the place i work. I already use a local server for tests, and don't focus my judgment on WYSIWYG output, i test over and over using multiple browsers. So, for classic asp support, i decided to go with notepad++ and for the other tasks i'm using php eclipse, that in comparison to aptana, covers my needs in a better way. Thank you all for the support, i really appreciated all the feedback.

Re:It's not open source, but here it goes

[scotjam]

mmmm... sandwich in little triangles

Re:notepad++ dude. And an answer...

[thomst]

LWATCDR inquired:

Okay how about Kompozer and Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html and http://kompozer.net/

Bluefish is just a text editor. It's a powerful, capable, lightweight text editor that can handle a huge number of open files simultaneously - but it's just a text editor. Handy for coders, but the OP asked for WYSIWYG editors, not text editors. (Personally, I still use good, ol'd PFE 32 1.01.000.)

Kompozer does a pretty good job of cut-and-paste for tables, and I like the integrated FTP client and the ability to call W3C's HTML validator service from within the app. That said, it's still a beta application, and there hasn't been any development on it since 2009 (which means, among other things, that it's still broken on Linux). On the good foot, it's OS, so anyone with coding skills is free to fix any bugs or add any features they like.

NVU/Kompozer, but text is better.

[RaianTheFallen]

NVU/Kompozer. I've used them exclusively until ditching WYSIWYG entirely; now I use Notepad++. Personally, I would recommend not relying on WYSIWYG; but then again, everyone is different .

Why I Want WYSISYG

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked the same question (an OS alternative to Dreamweaver) at work today, and someone pointed me to this post.

Here's my story. My work won't pay for Dreamweaver. I am a training developer, and was using the web suite, but ported over to the production suite to create video tutorials, etc. As a small part of my job, I maintain the training page on our company website. I don't edit the CSS. I don't TOUCH the CSS, and I don't care to. Web design in that sense is not my job. I know enough HTML to get by and do what I need to do, but most of what I create is basic HTML (well, ASP, actually, but very basic stuff). I'm working within a structure someone else made. I don't worry about formatting, other than picking the right class for the right table, etc., and choosing the occasional heading or bold.

Yes, I can create most of what I do in code. I can create the tables and bolds by hand... but why, when I could use a WYSWIG? I know that it doesn't look the exact same, but who cares. I'll check when it's done. Again, I'm not editing CSS.

Don't call me stupid for wanting to do something faster and easier. And I'm not a coder by nature, so coding is NOT faster for me. Maybe for you, but not for me.