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Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver?

Posted by timothy on from the there-should-be-one-called-vision-quest dept.

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."

3 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. web development edition of eclipse by jperl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. 100% agree. by oneiros27 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
  3. There's nothing very good by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.