Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Which Web Authoring Tool is the Best?
Chris Deckard asks:
"I have been assigned the task of finding the best web
authoring software or package to use for site layout and
design. Currently I am looking at Macromedia's DreamWeaver
2 and Adobe's GoLive 4. Cross platform compatability is
a must (MacOS and Windows). Which packages are used by
those out there and why do you like them? Name other
packages that are out there. We want the one with the
most features, but that is easy to use as well."
Homesite. Period. Use vmware so you can use it ;)
in linux, though
Emacs does well, especially XEmacs with html-helper or psgml mode. :)
Allen (my account password is in a locked room at the moment. Honest.)
Of course, there is no real HTML editor for Linux because once again, OSS programmers don't care about usability.
Markup was made to be machine readable, not specifically human readable. And while it is nice that you can edit it by hand, clearly there is an intention in the SGML world that spawned HTML, that structured document editors would exist tailored for each DTD.
Anyone who would like to be able to "drop" an image into a document and have width/height set automatically, or, to edit the color of something by clicking on a color wheel instead of trying to figure out the RGB values is clearly a "IDIOT" and "stupid" person in the minds of hackers.
Even if you don't want WYSIWYG capability, tools like Allaire's HOMESITE are vastly superior to a plain old notepad.
I'd like to know what this guy uses for a spreadsheet? A calculator?
Lets talk about some of the linux and Java tools for editing web content, I'm really interested in tools that help do Macromedia Flash but run under linux, I'm hoping there is a Flash clone, or dream weaver clone or something.
USE DREAM WEAVER!!
every other wysiwyg I've used tries to override thing things you added in a text editor (still the best way to design of course), but DreamWeaver actually preserves all the tags, including any that it doesn't understand.
Plus it has that handy feature of interpretting SSI include tags...
Well emacs is not exactly WYSWYG, but it provides a large amount of HTML related macro's and syntax highlight. It's also cross platform. Also, learn HTML.
If you are in a mixed-platform environment (Mac/Windows), Dreamweaver is the only way to go. Wondefully extensible, nice code, and great site management features that don't muck up your server like FrontPage. Hand-coding is fine until you end up with a site with thousands of pages. Also, if you are in education, you can get it for only $99.
I work at a company that builds web sites for very high profile (fortune 500) companies. Before I started working there, I would have assumed that people that code HTML and that were not programmers would use a WYSIWYG tool, or some kind of hand holding UI. However most, if not all, of our 30 or 35 designers use Emacs, or some other type of general editor, and there are two reasons for this.
First, they want to know what's going on in their HTML code just like programmers want to know what's going on in whatever language they're writing in. Second, different browsers are more or less sensitive to whitespace around certain tags and designers need to ensure that these tags are generated correctly.
Any "auto-generated" page still needs an HTML framework. From what I hear, Dreamweaver does well with ASP, but I've never used it. I prefer TextPad 32. Great MDI text editor.
Hey, buddy. I feel your pain. But keep in mind, Slashdot is FILLED with people with the "if it ain't difficult, it sucks" mentality. Very few "real world" type people here. I agree with you. Real professionals (not college punks, not people working on personal sites, not part time fun work for your friend) don't use "emacs".
Yeah, I'm a college student (and the owner of the post which you replied too). I've seen Dreamweaver for that price in our bookstore... but can I continue to use it once I leave college? Can I use it for non-college-related things? I know I , but the question is if I (if it's part of the agreement). Just wondering if you knew.
I suppose you think we should limit production of printed material to typesetters also. The press should be strictly controlled to maintain good design standards, which are, after all more important than the message anyways.
I have to throw my chip in for cyberstudio. About 6 months ago I had to choose which one i would have to spend 6 hours a day 5 days a week on.
:-}
Dreamweaver I thought was nice, indeed it was the only one I had even tried up to that point and was happy with it, but when it comes to the shove for my purposes it has to be cyberstudio for its site menagement that is more an intregal part rather than seeming like an additional feature.
It really is a personal thing, if its a good looking small site you wish to create then dreamweaver else id say cyberstudio all the way.
btw, im having a good laugh at the 'write sites in the source html' threads, get a clue
Slashdot is about News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. IT'S DESIGNED TO BE PLATFORM AGNOSTIC. Stop your whining and get an account so you can filter the articles you don't like to see.
Usually the way it works is you can't use it for commercial purposes.
I'm not an HTML coder myself, but I can tell you that among the many reasons that the Mac oriented design department of the firm I work for refuses to switch to PC's is BBEdit. They really like this text editor and even Windows oriented programmers concede that it is a really fine application. The Mac version of DreamWeaver, by the way, ships with BBEdit bundled -- they integrate quite well with each other. On the PC side DreamWeaver integrates with HomeSite.
So DreamWeaver, with a platform specific text editor might be a reasonable way to go. I think some of the comments allude to a position that is essentially correct, you really do want your coders to be able to handle bare HTML as text. Even if they use WYSISYG to build tables, etc., they need to be able to tweak or go beyond the limitations of the application.
That's true, but tables are useful for a few things, like calendars and schedules. Content (especially if it's cool/funny/technical) is key.
Two years ago, when I was in the Windows world, I used UltraEdit, which everyone trapped inside Windows OUGHT to check out. These days, I love Emacs.
Eight words: GNU Emacs for Windows NT and Windows 95/98.
'nuff said.
Feels like a job for the moderators.
try to post ARGUMENTS when you start to brag how l33t you are. posts like "vi rocks" or ":syntax on" don't help the guy who initiated the thread at all...
Have you ever worked at a real company? Have you ever been out into the real world?
Designers are rarely computer people.
According to the logs the majority of Slashdot readers use Windows. Draw your own conclusions.
My roommate even has a cool little button on his webpage that say "Powered by Notepad.exe"
:)
Even if you eventally use a visual HTML code generator, do yourself a favor and learn HTML. No visual tool produces perfect code and if you do CGI scripting a knowledge of HTML is a must.
Personally, I use (X)emacs for all my editing, but if you want a windoze-ish editor try Allaire Homesite. It's a code-based HTML editor with excellent help and wizards which actually help you learn HTML as you produce working pages. (http://www,allaire.com).
As for visual tools, Dreamweaver is the best by far, and it meets your multi-platform requirements. Of all the visual tools I've tried, Dreamweaver produces the cleanest code and provides the greatest flexibility. (http://www.macromedia.com)
Let me repeat, however, that nothing is better than skilled hand-coding.
Chris-S (forgot my password)
chris@simpkins.org
I always thought it was a "News for Nerds stuff". Slashdot has never claimed to be a Linux evangelism site, just things that nerds are interested in. Hush.
So, nice try. Next contestant, please.
The fucking point is: He already determined that he wanted a WYSIWIG product. Answer the question, don't shove your supid ideology down his throat.
> Some people don't want to learn HTML or think
> it's too time consuming to directly write.
Reason 2 is acceptable. Reason 1 is not. Anyone doing something complicated that it matters what tool they use, had damn well better be reasonably familiar with HTML. Not to necessarily know every tag, but should be able to read, understand, and modify HTML.
I am all for using authoring tools, but people still need to know something of the underlying HTML. Reasons:
1) so you can fix things that authoring tools break. Not tool is perfect, and there will be times you have to go fix it.
2) Knowing HTML will give you a better idea of how the file generated by your layout tool will look on other web browsers. Whatever you say about lynx, many people use it, at least occasionally. If you are going to make something that looks bad in Lynx, you should at least *know* it will.
3) Dynamically generated HTML. CGI's et. al. may need to dynamically generate HTML. Once this goes beyond simple "fill in the blank" stuff, people will need to have knowledge of HTML, in order to generate it.
Don't believe it! Frontpage may no longer mess up the entire file, but it still puts cruddy MS custom tags in!
I've seen Quicktime 4 slow down a fast pII to the point where I had to check to make sure it was actually a pII. I was trying to watch those new starwars trailers. I guess I can see why Apple wouldn't want to put too much effort into developing good software for Windoze, but I don't understand why can't figure out a way to create good software in general.
I have often found myself downloading a page and editing it just to make it readable! Many sites that should know better (in my opinion) -large news sites who abuse the 'font' tag. I really dont know what motivates these people to display all text in &ht;font size="2">. This is quite unreadable at 600*800, and when doubled with the abuse of tables to do page layout is anoying. Tables have their place. They can be great for displaying certian kinds of information. table was not designed to be abused^H^H^H^H^H^Hused for page layout. People often say html is 'whatever abuse^H^H^H^H^Huse you can make of it', sadly these people often get 'the perversity prize' for provoking radically different behaviour in different browsers or browser versions. Lynx usually does a good job of displaying html that would be unreadable in a gui browser.
Many hate Lynx because it doesnt display pretty pictures, but i'd give up pretty pictures any day just to be able to read without noticing the effort. Unless of course the site if full of frames... *sigh*
"Hell is other websmiths." -- Jean-Paul Sartre, updated
The original question was "I have been assigned the task of finding the best web authoring software or package ..." The poster - Cliff Deckard - wrote that he was looking at GUI editors, but he didn't say that GUI tools were needed.
Personally, I think that it is easier to maintain web pages using Perl and a text editor such as vi or Emacs than with WYSIWYG editors such as MS FrontPage. Vi, emacs, and Perl are "packages that are out there" that Mr. Deckard should consider, along with the GUI tools.
Amaya from W3C is cool. Dozer wasn't too bad the last time I had a look either.
Where does it say "News for Linux Users. Stuff that matters to Linux Users"? I think a major problem with this site is it advertises to be a real "geek/nerd" site but seems to only share a limited view of what that is. In this case the people who run this site think it's Linux and Star Wars and bash anything non related or seen as possible competetion. I'd be happier if it was advertised the way it really is rather than something else.
But, my point is that the only thing this site gaurantees is that you'll get some geeky news that has (should have) some importance to it's readers.
FrontPage is an abomination. It wrecks your carefully crafted HTML, not only by fscking up all your formatting, but by inserting and removing tags because "MS knows best". It sucks big time.
It also requires Frontpage extensions on the server -- which also breaks occasionally. Total crappucino.
On wow, I'm so thrilled they finally improved that Trojan of a program! Now it only has to catch up to Dreamweaver 2 and HomeSite.
FrontPage is still crap becuase MS still requires stupid Frontpage extension on the server. MS is STILL polluting standards with shite that nobody needs.
Tell me what else FP2000 will do for me besides de-stabilizing Windows and fsking up my other apps while it's at it???
HomeSite 4 has Code Sweeper for crap like that.
ALLAIRE ROCKS! HOMESITE ROCKS!
No..thats not true. My latest project has 170+
HTML files and it was created entirely with
PHP3/MySQL/Apache and VIM. I still can't see
the point of HTML editors, especially with inline
scripting like PHP3 or ASP. If you don't believe
me, hit http://www.mschess.org and click "Login
as Guest"
After taking a look at your site, I am somehow unconvinced that you know enough about design to tell us what tools we should be using. Man, that is ugly.
Uhrm, excuse me, but I use LaTeX when I write my papers.
WTF?? You mean you don't just write your papers in Postscript?!? Personally, I find it much easier to just write:
50 dict begin
/ifdef {1 index where {pop pop pop}{def} ifelse} bind def
/rrcurveto {4 {2 index sub 6 1 roll} repeat
2 {6 1 roll} repeat} bind ifdef
/arct {arcto pop pop pop pop} bind ifdef
...
;-)
Are you kidding?? Notepad hasn't changed since Windows version 1!
Try EDIT.COM, also distributed with Windows. It's more feature-rich and just generally better than Notepad.
Actually, since you asked, I have written with two other people a 50,000 line Java program to manage web content in an object database. I think that my system is pretty good if you're managing a big site. I think that there are other tools out there that are just as good or better than what I did. However, for the vast majority of people who just want to put some information on the web about their business, themselves, things they've written, etc, a web authoring tool makes the most sense. That is what the person asked for. What the poster asked for (in not so many words) is a whiz-bang commercial product -- not a cryptic text editor. As a programmer, I use xemacs and vi to do my editing, and since I know HTML pretty well, I use a text editor to do the web stuff that I need to do personally. However, I can certainly see that for the vast majority of people trying to take advantage of the web as a personal publishing medium, authoring tools are the easiest, quickest way to produce what is needed. Recognize that what computers mean to you, namely an interesting system which you enjoy learning about and doing things with, is not what they mean to everyone else, nor should they. Many people think that this web thing is cool and just want to make a web page. That is probably what the poster was asking for.
Can I use an external HTML editor like BBEdit with GoLive?
You can with Internet Explorer. (Btw Jarod, your site looks great)
I do heavy HTML work for some aspects of my work. Being as I actually handle the content, there's nothing better than emacs HHM. You get the best editor around as well as a competant, intuitive markup system. And believe me, once you get the hotkeys down, you fly... (without making crap code, like most packages, I might add).
Um, no.
*Real* web pages are generated from scripts. No one really does anything by hand anymore. Now, which would you rather use to write your perl scripts: vi, or FrontPage 2000?
Dumbass.
FrontPage is still crap becuase MS still requires stupid Frontpage extension on the server.
Sorry, but that's pure bullshit. Frontpage extensions have never been required to be installed on the server. Only a select few Frontpage features (instant search, hit counter, other useless stuff) actually requires the extensions. I've been designing with FP98 for a year and have never published to a server that actually had the extensions installed.
MS is STILL polluting standards with shite that nobody needs.
There's at least some truth to this, but FP2k eliminated the problems it can cause by implementing a compatibility mode. Just set how compatible you want your site to be in the options, and functions that only work in newer browsers will not be available, or implemented differently.
Tell me what else FP2000 will do for me besides de-stabilizing Windows and fsking up my other apps while it's at it???
Don't know why it would de-stabilize windows more than any other app, but here's what it can do for you: it makes site management easy. Read any web review of the FP line, and you'll see that its elegent handling of site mangement puts it ahead of all the other WYSIWYG editors. Want to rename an image that's used in half your pages without having to update your links? Go for it, FP makes the updates itself. Functions like that sound simple on paper, but when you're actually managing a site with 20+ pages, it's a huge timesaver. The link tracking features alone make FP worth using (IMHO).
I use nested tables on my site. I have NEVER used a wysiwyg and I doubt I ever will. What a useless invention. Just use your brain, you do have one don't you? I have seen more wysiwyged pages that are total bloat. Multiple, redundant and useless tags. No wonder it is the world wide wait. Go to a site like sclegacy and look at their code. It is terrible. I wondered what would happen if it was written right (so I redid it) and found it shrinked by 2/3. You would think it was written by M$.
Time has a tendancy to move forward. We invite you to join us. You only seem to be several years behind. You can still catch up.
-AC
The problem is people who use FIXED size tables for holding content. That makes those unreadable pages at high resolution, especially combined with fixed size fonts ! What people should do is proportionnal sized table for formatting text, that way it always looks good whatever the resolution (ie, give table width in % and not pixel).
Because most of the people here are into giving their opinion rather than helping you out, I will say that Dreamweaver is the best WYSIWYG tool out there although I have been doing HTML in Notepad (and still do) for years. But Dreamweaver helps when I am doing simple pages and I want to speed things up. Best all around features plus I love how it doesn't add unneccesary crap to your code. Macromedia's products are VERY solid and the site-wide features of DW are nice and fast. I have only used it with sites with less than 40 pages though.
That site of yours is really well done. It looks like a page that was designed by a multibillion dollar corporation instead of a solo hacker such as yourself. I can tell you really know what you're talking about!
>Now, if I can quote myself:
>
>BEGIN QUOTE
> ESR is an idiot.
>END QUOTE
and not to mention, he has one ugly web page.
this one is missed by the moderators.
Cyberstudio gives you the power of a text editor (and lets you operate in text editing mode), it doesn't wreck your beautiful hand written code when you load it in, and it as great WYSIWYG and
outlining tools.
Everyone I know that has tried both (amongst those
of us that still prefer to use a text editor, but
often need a WYSIWYG tool to get certain difficult
things done quickly) prefers Cyberstudio, but I
guess (since CS is currently Mac only) most people
writing here have never tried it.
If you need a too for Windows and need it now then Dreamweaver or a decent text editor are the only good options for professionals.
I've been using an unusual combination for a web site:
- Dreamweaver 2.0 on Mac
- CL-HTTP (a large Lisp library for web stuff) for static page generation
Dreamweaver is the best I found for "WYSIWYG" works.
Problems with Dreamweaver:
- buggy
- crashy
- really memory hungry
- table editing is a mess
- a lot of subtle bugs
I used to write the HTML in hand, but the preprocessing makes things much easier: I changed the bland h1-h3 headings to something more nifty by just editing the style file - I still use @h1 tag in my files, but it just gets converted - I can go back to something else entirely in the future, and not have to edit any of my source files. Preprocessing also gives me some other abilities, like make a table of contents, and checking #name links. The source for the script is at http://www.andreasen.org/smart.shtml - the documentation is not very good however. Take a look at the rest of my website to see what the language can easily do.
I change some of the source pages, then run my sync script, which regenerates the HTML and does a rsync to my website - fast and easy, since rsync only sends the changed files.
(Ouch, pressing preview removed all the HTML tags and put all things on one long line, wonder if that was kfm's fault - sorry if things look strange..)
Of course, I gave the wrong URL. The right URL is: http://www.andreasen.org/smart/ !
It seems to me that the people who need things
;). We use plain text editors and don't do a huge
done FAST (ie, they have lives) use WYSIWYG and
get their stuff done. They're not necessarily
unknowledgable about HTML, they just are in the
business of pumping stuff out quick.
The people who want a site they're going to come
back to but are also pressed for time/patience
use the 'developer WYSIWYG' editors, and get their
stuff done, and done right. They know what they're
doing and don't want to sit down for each and
every page. These people are professionals.
Then there are the rest of us (I am in this group
volume of HTML, but what we do do, we do "the right way" (according to us at least).
Not that we're always putting out the best code..
But at least we're familiar with it
Honestly, if you're managing a huge site with over a hundred pages, I doubt you'd have the time to change each file individually by editing them through Notepad. Aside from that, Notepad handles spaces and carriage-returns horribly. Create templates in Dreamweaver, edit them in UltraEdit, edit the code on your other pages in UltraEdit and you'll be safe from any problems. Notepad and just plain UltraEdit are fine if you have just a few pages... but when you're managing a large site, you'll love the fact that Dreamweaver will automatically apply any changes you make to your templates to ALL pages using that template. Tip: Don't use the "Clean Up HTML" function in Dreamweaver. It has this unfortunate tendency to mess up your <center> tags (has to do with HTML4.0 using DIV) and it seems to overuse the <p> and </p> tags.
I think that having been writing HTML since 1994, for a living, I'm qualified to speak out here. The fact is that that WYSINWYG editors simply *aren't good enough*. You can do a decent first pass with one or two of them (I mean that - the non-SGML-DTD validating ones just outright suck. The ones that *INSIST* on reformatting perfectly good HTML are the worst) - but the difference between a web pages that is OK and a web page that is great is made with a text editor, with hand coded HTML.
WYSINWYG editors frequently produce code that is (A) Syntaxtically *broken* (B) Non-portable (Looks best viewed on *MY* computer with my web browser) (C) Badly bloated (D) Completely inaccessible to the disabled.
The fact is that the *MORE* WYSNWYG the tool is - the *WORSE* the output generally is. Its because HTML and WYSWIG are contradictions in terms.
HTML was designed for *information markup*. WYSWIG for *visual* markup. You can (usually) achieve both by hand - I've yet to see a 'easy to use' WYSINWYG editor manage a good job of it.
Don't get me wrong - for *some* tasks like quickly importing a Word doc to HTML for a _first pass_ conversion or rapid prototyping of pages they are great. But unless the editor allows me to dive *past* the GUI to the HTML - it will usually suck big rocks if used for the *final* output.
There are dozens of perl modules and other real tools to do this for you. This is nothing.
Emacs has a timestamp.
No, I've never used FrontPage and in fact I've never heard of it until today (or homesite, dreamweaver or any of these other things), but if it's a MS product, I doubt it's even available for Solaris. Seems crazy to purchase an NT machine just to develop the web site.
Sir, I solute your sense of the obvious, that keep brasp that HTML is NOT a layout language. Frames, are of course, in all their incarnations, illogical and contrary to how the web should work.
Tables, I must disagree with you, however. They are poorly used as a market, but a table used to express (how novel) a table is okay. A pricing chart expressed as a table, a calandar MAYBE... But using it as a formatting tool is simply unacceptible.
I used notepad (still do for small stuff) or pico but, a friend of mine (who is a big on editors) finally got me to switch to EditPlus. The line numbers and the color coding are great. I need to find something like this for Linux.
Look, a lot of unix/windows freaks have made their points here - but remember, the Mac's stronghold is in graphic design. All the Mac web designers that I know use both GoLive and BBedit. You can't go wrong with the combination of these, although BBedit is Mac only right now.
I think unix and windows users don't realize what they're missing - although GoLive is now going cross platform, so they'll finally get an idea.
Seriously, if you think that how long you've been writing HTML is the qualifier for technical authority, then you should shut the hell up. I've been writing HTML since before I'm sure you were even on the net. Before Mosaic came out even. I was writing web pages at the end of 1992 using the CERN line mode browser.
:)
I've tried: FP95, Pagemill2, Hotdog, HotMetal pro, Homesite 3,4, Dreamweaver 2, vim.
Oh, and notepad. My conclusion: vim is the best by far, but you'll have to learn it. Homesite is the best of the rest.
Unfortunately, I doubt that either of them is available for Macs.. If they aren't,
I would personally use the simplest text editor.
Why?
Well, the problem with WYSIWYG is that they're very inflexible. If you're making a simple site, it's ok but try
to make some advanced design and they get in the way and are a major pain in the ass.
Now to vim.. its very handy for web design especially cause in web design you have to make small adjustments to HTML all the time, and vim allows to do that very fast. You don't have to take your hands off the home row and there are all the nice shortcuts like 3e to move 3 words forward and to the end of word, dd to delete current line, and there are hundreds of commands like that. Steep learning curve but is a pleasure to work with afterwards.
first of all, allaire's homesite does not make any changes to HTML code.
second, it's best to set width and height for any image because browser displays text right away when it gets it instead of waiting for images to load to get their size for laying out the page.
generally, i agree though that text editors are quite usable (homesite) and vim is the best there is, although doesn't have many nice features Homesite has.
Registrant:
Memphis Scholastic Chess (MSCHESS-DOM)
5247 Shelbourne Circle #14
Memphis, TN 38134
US
And that's bullshit. Posts are deleted from SlashDot. Happens all the time. Kinda' hard to prove though, wouldn't you think? And to think that all geeks use Linux is laughable. Please. Maybe the geekeiest fo the geeks, but I'm on a computer for EVERY hour I'm awake, and Linux isn't even an option.
As for there being nothing else like this on any other platform, I have one thing to say:
:) 3-4 megs if I remember correctly. But, it does have an excellect mail (vm) and news (gnus) reader.
emacs
Emacs does what you've described and much more. Now, I have used BBEdit, and if you're into using macos it's definately the way to go, but it's certainly not a reason to switch.
Only one thing though... emacs uses a little more ram
ah...hahahahahahahaha
As you post a comment on slashdot...heh.
Notepad absolutely SUCKS like nothing else in the world. Any editor that leaves ^M's everywhere SUCKS SUCKS. Dreamweaver let's you save without those endlines =0 I personally use dreamweaver, but I can do things by hand too.
Check the reviews on zdnet.com and all those mags -- NetObjects Fusion is the best GUI editor out there. It doesn't mess with your code either if you hack by hand as well. It's got a great management system and allows you to designate portions of a page as shared (like Front Page's shared borders). FP is actually a poorly done clone of Fusion. The only catch is it's expensive, but well worth it for professional web design. ($400) NetObjects is an IBM company, FYI. Check out http://www.netobjects.com for more info.
I have used Adobe PageMill in the past because it was availible to me, but the extra code was the problem that eventually lead me back to text editors. I have seen some of the source code for Dreamweaver and it looked clean, which is great if others are working on the project too. My question is, does Go Live add or manipulate the code as did PageMill? Is the code clean before and after you save it in Go Live. I am currently trying to choose either one of these editors in a professional setting.
Regarding the tables and frames, obviously your page will not use frames since you just re-did my page and I didn't use them originally.
/. effect on an ISDN line ;)
I don't write HTML to look nice at the source level, I write it to look nice after the browser renders it. As long as I can read it and I'm comfortable with it, that's all that matters. HTML is not like C where many people are going to be looking at your source code. If you'd like though, I can take the time to format it nicely so you can read it, as I don't have a program doing all the formatting for me.
The page at jcs.superblock.net was created just as a personal home page and I never meant to 'advertise' the URL, thus the lack of proper HTML code. Thank you, by the way, for putting my site in the spotlight and allowing me to witness the
These things aside, I think you really missed the point of my post. Regardless of how quickly you can make a page in FrontPage, or how tedious it is in vim, it makes no difference on the content of the page. Whether I have to put the bold tag around some words, or you have to highlight it and click a button, it's the same words in bold.
Dreamweaver 2.0 all the way.
When I just started I used Netscape Composer (a fact which embaresses me to this day).
One of the main features of Dreamweaver that is a dream for me is that I can still recognize my code when i'm done. Composer makes spaghetti out of it.
Text editors are fine, too, but for graphical tools go with Dreamweaver.
That said, I never used that other one...
I'm not sure what the FrontPage Mac story is these days. I think there is a Mac version, but it's probably pretty old. Now that FrontPage is part of Office, perhaps MS will update the Mac port.
It runs just fine under VMWare, of course.
Tables and frames do not belong on a WWW page. HTML is a markup language, NOT a layout language. It is up to the user to determine how the page is laid out, NOT the author.
Please don't abuse the WWW any more than it already has been.
I use a text editor for most of my HTML work now, but in the past I used Homesite-lets you preview the web page inside the program (needs IE installed though) and lets you convieniently edit tags by right clicking on then and editing settings in a dialog box.
NetObjects Fusion lets you design pages and layouts with amazing ease very similar to a desktop publishing program. Can create and move images, textboxes, tables, anywhere on the page and reproduces them usually very suprising accurately in the finished HTML. And has a very neat and useful flowchart/tree view of your website. Only problem is that is creates messy HTML (like most wysiwyg editors). Some simple pages with a table and some text ended up being 13K. But if you want a prog that is easy to use, this may be the best!
Dreamweaver is very good too, almost as easy to use as Netobjects fusion.
Best bet it to use a text editor. You learn HTML better that with a wysiwyg edior, the html files are much smaller, and usually have better control over the layout. Use something other than notepad, it is crap and there are dozens of much better free ones you can download. I never understand why some people brag they use notepad-I would almost rather use any edior than that one. I rather like Gnome's notepad+.
L-man
I use Homesite, though I do more programming than design. I just don't trust WYSIWYG. I like to know exactly what my code is doing. Rather than trying to save time by buying fancy tools, invest in good people who understand how the code works, you'll be better off in the long run.
All you damn "use emacs/vi/vim/notepad/whatever" people need to think about your computer-centric view of the universe. Some people don't want to learn HTML or think it's too time consuming to directly write it. Think about the things that make your life faster and easier. Do you use an automatic clothes washer? Do you know how to use a washboard and soap? If not, why don't you learn? If so, Do you use it to wash all of your clothes? How about your car? Why use it when you can walk or ride a bicycle and not rely on an engine to get you where you want to go. How about calculators? Don't you know how to do math? Some of you people need to reevaluate your view of the universe and realize that not everyone likes computers for their own sake. Some people just want to use them as tools. For those people, and others who simply don't have the time to devote to writing HTML, there are HTML editors. The poster asked for a reccomendation, and 2/3 of the comments here are smart-ass "use emacs" responses. What does that say about you? Are you an outcast from society? Does no one want to hang around you? Maybe it's because you act like a dick to people who don't have exactly the same interests as you. Think about it.
> Uhm, funny thing.
> A) I don't recall the "Editor Wars" of which you so authoritatively speak.
> B) Who declared emacs the winner?
At LinuxExpo, there was an emacs vs. vi paintball war. Emacs won, therefore making it the definitive winner in the editor war. QED.
People still use text editors for HTML because it offers the greatest level of control.
:- frontpage
:- lovingly crafted, hand-optimised HTML + perl/python scripts and SQL database backend...
You may knock together a quick application in Visual Basic, but to get it running at a decent speed and efficiency, you use C++.
Same goes for HTML -
quick application
maximum efficiency
And note that using a text editor for HTML is a good idea, so long as the text editor is (X)EMACS - it has syntax highlighting for html entering, and even has a pretty speedy web browser BUILT IN as a module - so you are using a WYSIWYG editor, sortof - think of viewing in the internal web browser as a "print preview" mode...
It's not as if offical w3c spec HTML 4.0 + CSS1 is a very hard language to learn. My 14 year old brother downloaded the spec, read it, and started hand-coding right away, just like I did with 3.2 and 4.0, so it can't be hard unless you're really stupid. HTML only gets fscked up when one has to deal with the lame "features" of IE (and NS). Using frontpage (and composer) propagate these "features", since they craftily use them at every opportunity in an attempt at vendor lock-in.
The first few lines of your remarks read like a FrontPage feature list. Image renaming with link fixup has been supported for several releases. FrontPage 2000 has a category feature that lets you generate a list with links to all pages in a particular category, and have that list be updated automatically whenever a page is recategorized, added, or deleted. FrontPage has had an automatically-updating timestamp component since version 1.0 in the Vermeer days (before MS even acquired the company). FrontPage adds image size information (width= and height=) and automatically updates all the relevant pages when an image changes. It's clear that you have simply never used the product.
That being said, I agree with you 100 per cent that for web sites with a lot of repetitive, template+data content, such as slashdot, or a daily news site, a document-centric approach like frontpage or the other wysiwyg editors is unsuitable. Obviously if you want totally custom functionality, you are going to end up writing custom code.
There is a place for WYSIWYG. Especially for a quick slap-me-up or drafting out some ideas, to be cleaned up later. But for true web page design, a plain text editor is the *only* way to go.
--
An example - at the college where I work, the "web page essentials" course that is being offered there is really taught as a "FrontPage 98" class - no real HTML is ever dealt with. They do this in order to teach web design in a "real world environment", since people working real jobs don't have the time to learn HTML, right?
At the same time, the local high school where I attended in the past is offering web page design in their computer labs... and guess what? They're using notepad.exe (So it's no vi... but its a start... ; )!
Both the college students and the high school students get one semester to learn this stuff.
The results? The student webpages at the college suck. I don't just mean graphical quality (that's a talent issue). I mean technical issues. Such as HTML that *breaks browsers*. Such as BMP and AOL ART files showing up all over the place. Such as 800x600 jpegs being resized to 150x100 IN THE HTML, leaving horrendous download times and aweful jaggies. Such as the inane misuse and abuse of "fphover.class". Such as missing graphics altogether (some students never fully understand that the default.htm and the graphics files are in fact *separate files* that need to be uploaded together!!!). The complete and total lack of understanding of the essentials of how the World Wide Web works after these students finish "web page essentials" disturbs me greatly.
At the same time, many of the high school pages render better than some "professional" sites that I've seen! If they're no good at making graphics, they at least have a grasp of how the graphics work (and many of them just get the class Photoshop whiz to whip up graphics for everybody). No BMPs or improperly resized graphics. I see some style sheets being used. A lot of the students take the time to validate their HTML and make it as browser compatible as they can. They use java and animated gifs sparingly. Some advanced students actually delve into CGI a bit. They've even installed PHP this semester on their server. They *know* that a web page functions differently than a Word file. And it shows.
After learning HTML, the high school students do mess with Netscape Composer, FrontPage, and Homesite a bit.
The high school students kick the college students' collective butts.
-Josh
Before I start, I would like to point out that for trivial HTML (like anything not on a live organizational site), any tool will do. If you are considering anything remotely non-trivial, read on.
Firstly, if you are using a text editor of any kind, emacs is the obvious choice. I won't beat the dead horse as emacs won the editor wars years ago.
Now what I am about to say should be inviolate:
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
Maintaining a serious site requires heavy automation. No serious site today that I know of generates pages manually.
Use a tool to manage your data - perhaps a SQL database or XML, and then use tools like perl to translate that data to HTML. Do not simply create HTML - you will be very sorry later when you need to repurpose that data.
Tools like GoLive should only be used to prototype. Production pages should never come out of these WYSIWYG design tools.
Dreamweaver works wonderfully with regular text editors INCLUDING emacs. I use dw all the time to create Embperl and ASP pages to do all the layout, formatting etc and then I switch to emacs to edit the actual code (perl of course) on the pages.
There is nothing wrong with using a tool like dw to create all your HTML if you actually understand how the HTML works. Using DW I can create HTML pages that look descent and then I can concentrate on adding perl code to them.
DW is one of the main reasons that I have a NT box on my desk, well that and using it to administrate our SQL server db (shudder). The rest of the time I use linux to do my regular programming work.
I haven't used other tools so I don't have much of an opinion of them. I guess the best way to evaluate them is to look at the HTML they actually generate. If it looks like unreadable crap then don't bother, move on.
WebMonkey has a review of WYSISYG editors at
. html?tw=frontdoor
http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/19/index1a
I've been using GoLive (nee CyberStudio) since version 2.0 and I'm pretty happy with it.
The Mozilla project does indeed include Composer. However, the need for a more powerful graphical editor in the same realm as Dreamweaver is great, IMHO. Composer could possibly be extended to provide such functionality, but its greatest strength in most cases is its simplicity... I'd hate to see that compromised. I'm assisting in the creation of the curriculum for a high-school-level class in Linux. Tentatively, one section of the class is on building Apache and managing a small Web presence. I'd like to couple the Web serving unit with a unit on Web design, but I'm in need of a design tool comparable to Dreamweaver, I believe. So, in essence, is anyone working on one? If I can't find a suitable application, I'd settle for running Dreamweaver within WINE. Has anyone experimented with this? The reports on WineHQ are a bit sketchy.
You know, when people can't be bothered to fix their typos, that's one thing. When they reply without reading, that's another.
That's not what was said at all. Here's the relevant snippet:
It exceeded his disk quota, it didn't trash his provider's systems.
Mind the Gap
Not the point that was raised, as you well know. It is desirable to have the editor figure out the image size for you, because then you don't have to pull the image up in another tool to check it yourself.
God almighty. Let's say you want a specific green. You're saying you'd rather find it by trial and error with hex triplets than pick from a palette or move a few sliders? Liar.
No, it's not like saying that at all. I can't even begin to express how far off the mark you are with that comparison.
Yeah, but do you want to spend the time doing a chore that can be automated easily? I'd rather hit CTRL-Q to create a blockquote ... /blockquote pair than type the tag out manually. Especially if I had, say, five quotations to deal with. In fact, in putting tt tags around that last example, I accidentally left out the /, messing things up. A proper editor would handle that pointless housekeeping chore for me.
Who cares how the HTML comes out? As long as it conforms to the standard and does what you want, it doesn't matter. A proper Web-making tool could help you manage your sites, write (and verify) valid HTML with less manual labour, and maybe even clean up messes made by lesser authors with imperfect knowledge of the standard (or imperfect WYSIWYG toys). Yet you pretend you'd spurn such a tool.
What, you want me to believe you write all of your stuff (perfectly, the first time, of course) with cat? Nobody's impressed...
Mind the Gap
Alex Bischoff
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
The following is my opinion, and is based on information no more scientific than my own meandering experiences. If you think, even for a second, that this information should be considered canonical, take a healthy dose of reality and call me in the morning. This is my opinion. Try it for yourself.
I have always preferred coding web pages using nothing more complicated than vi for Linux, or Notepad for Windows. Those who extoll WYSIWIG editors tend to emphasise all the "cool stuff" you can do with them. I remind you that those "cool things" are still implemented with plain old HTML code, which I can crank out just as well. As much as I would like to show you some examples of my work, they are all on my home box, connected via 33.6 modem. I predict that my machine would begin to blow up about 1/4 second after being linked to here. I have no desire to be slashdotted today, thank you very much :)
Oh, also, please don't take the page shown with my user info as any indication of my current design skills. Those pages were made several years ago, and were my first attempts at HTML. They suck large by today's standards
My main reason to go simple ASCII is this: I know exactly what is going on under the hood. If something isn't working cross-browser or cross-platform, I know exactly how the code is written, and how to re-write it to make it portable. With WYSISIG editors, you are often left wondering "How the fsck did it do this, and how can I fix it?" Or at least, that's what I've experienced.
Remember, this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
- Adam Schumachercybershoe@mindless.com
Pico r00lz!
Just kidding. I'm rather fond of BB Edit, and although I don't generally use GUI editors myself, if I did, I'd go with GoLive (formerly GoLive CyberStudio, now Adobe GoLive).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What about when you're maintaining a site with over 100 pages? I'm sorry- even in this reply it is plain that FrontPage has its priorities wrong. Rename an image? How about adding a page in a category and having all the related pages seamlessly update to include the new link. How about a timestamp with creation and modification dates for pages to give a time context to the content you're providing? How about taking inline graphics and transparently adding size tags to help browsers lay out quicker? I don't believe FrontPage is good enough, and it certainly isn't good enough to handle airwindows.com. It'd be a Sisyphean task maintaining a site like that with such a tool.
Instead I use Sitebot for the job. Stands to reason, after all I wrote it. It's a Mac program, but since the source is GPLed and online, anyone who wants to take any or all of it and make a Linux program out of it is quite welcome to do so.
At any rate, when you talk about elegant handling of site management, I have to laugh, because _none_ of the WYSIWYG tools _or_ a plain text editor is really up to the task. I use Sitebot, and Slashdot uses perl scripts, and any really serious site with a lot of content is _forced_ to use something suitable, otherwise it just won't be possible to manage the site at all. This means scripting or some form of site compiling- sitebot is more the latter and works from a directory structure on my hard disk. You can also use stuff like Frontier or Slashdot's perl scripts to dynamically generate the pages from a collection of data.
That data is not HTML, and this is the key point you're missing. It's just not feasible to have your actual data be in HTML. Instead it needs to be something editable and workable which is _turned_ into HTML as needed, producing HTML pages that are either disposable (Slashdot's generate-on-the-fly pages) or freely replaceable (my SiteBot's output, overwritten every time I run the bot- the original data is never touched.)
Do you understand this yet? 20 pages is _nothing_. 20 pages is corporate HTML art wankery-ville. Try 200 or 2000 and see how you do. At a certain point you hit a paradigm shift. Do you think news.com uses FrontPage? They, too, are using some custom software. Hell, man, even MSNBC is not using FrontPage. FRONTPAGE IS NOT SERIOUS, and to some extent neither is a standalone text editor all by itself- when you start dealing with really _demanding_ web tasks, it becomes specialized software, and the data you feed it might well be handled in a text editor- or you could be generating the data in a word processor and having the software translate the styling to HTML. But you won't be using FrontPage: it is inadequate.
Damn straight! That is absolutely right.
My approach to generating airwindows.com is to put _structural_ markup in the data files. In other words, I have pages with text information (and inline HTML if I like) on them, and the first two lines are header lines in a special format which gives the title and a summary of the page. These two headers turned out to be enough for my purposes, but others might find use for more elaborate headers. The point is, the headers don't go into the HTML, they are used to direct the _tool_ that's generating the HTML, and can produce more intelligent references to the page from other pages, or give fine-grained control over the whole structure of the resulting site.
I'll repeat the key phrase beause it's so right and worth repeating-
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
That could be done on the fly by Perl scripts like slashdot, or it can be done on your own machine whereupon you just re-upload all the pages or whichever set of pages is affected by the most recent update- but the auto-generating is a must.
An example (not live on the web yet)- I use iCab as a browser. It has a smily-frowny face feature (invariably frowny) regarding HTML compliance as stated in the page. If the page has errors, iCab makes a frowny and can give you an error report telling you what errors were found.
I went to my site with this tool, and found that it was giving lots of errors. This was partly because I'm doing HTML 3.2, on purpose, and am not enthusiastic about HTML 4 at all. I went into SiteBot and started changing code. After adding a comment that tells browsers the site is 3.2, most errors went away as the code _was_ correct HTML for 3.2, but there were a few details, a table tag that Netscape accepted that wasn't technically legal, minor stuff. I edited Sitebot's code some more and fixed that too, and rebuilt the site.
There are 384 items in the airwindows.com folder. That equates to somewhat less than 180 pages all told. _All_ were fixed by the changes, effortlessly. With a pure text editor you'd at least be composing massive search and replaces- and God knows what you'd have to deal with in a WYSIWYG, it'd be really ugly. Instead, the data is separate and the whole site is ready, next time I add new content and re-upload it, to switch to total HTML compliance and alert browsers to exactly what sort of parsing it will be needing.
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
Period.
I'd be happy to see a more "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." focus here. Perhaps I'm strange, but I see the opposite problem that you do. Slashdot tends to post lots of "somebody or other said linux is bad" or "somebody else said linux is good for PHBs," and i really could care less what mr. critic said about linux. I'd rather have more solid tech articles, regardless of the OS. Cool technology is cool technology, whether it's on Windows, MacOS, BeOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
Emacs is the best for html. now I know there are some features that it doesn't have- such as color wheels, automatic image insertion, etc. etc. But its macro system more than makes up for that.
Posted by DonR:
I've already talked to them about a port to BeOS. They said that their design team would examine the OS to determinte feasability of the port, and then the management types would have a go at figuring out the market for it. I'm sure you'll get a simmilar answer for a linux port
---
Donald Roeber
Posted by ChristianC:
The best tool is Dreamweaver 2 for the Mac. It comes with BBEdit 5, which is by far the best HTML text editor. The Windows version of Dreamweaver comes with Homesite, which is adequate but not something you'd want to use every day. Dreamweaver in conjunction with Fireworks is particularly productive. It also has very useful built-in FTP transfer functions.
The only bad thing about Dreamweaver is that it has far too many windows, so if you haven't got at least a 21" screen you'll find that you're moving and closing windows a lot of the time. GoLive is much more elegant in this respect, having tabbed windows. Having too many windows is a problem with other Macromedia apps like Director as well. Hopefully, Macromedia will sort this out with the next release.
Posted by Sy Borg:
You use Notepad? You really want to get hold of PFE. It's free and damn good for general editing.
Posted by mystikan:
Anyone who has taken a look at a site produced by a so-called WYSIWYG Web editor knows two things; 1) HTML produced with a Wysiwig editor is full of redundant tags which blow out the size of the document and thus waste bandwidth and download time. 2) Sites pruduced with these editors all have a pro-forma appearance; they LOOK like they were made in a web authoring package. Sorry, but IMNSHO there is nothing to beat pure, unadulterated, hand-coded HTML. It is not hard to learn, in fact it is often easier and quicker than getting to grips with the foibles of a wysiwig package. I use either MS Notepad (ugh!) for quick modifications or CygnusEd on my trusty Amiga for from-scratch jobs. - Mystikan - (Steve Roper)
Many if not most /. readers are anti-microsoft and always have been. Maybe even most of the authors and moderators are as well. But nobody ever deletes posts. They may be scored -1, but you can always read them. And maybe the reason so many pro-microsoft posts end up at -1 is they are little more than flame bait and distraction. On the rare occasions when such a post is both on-topic and well-thought-out, it is usually scored high and generates meaningful debate. As for your assertion that 'most geeks are using nt,' I would actually claim that very few geeks use nt. Most (though perhaps not all) people willing to work with such a piece of shit cannot honestly call themselves geeks. If you want to use it, fine. If you think slashdot is biased, you're probably right. Since this offends you, I recommend you go instead to any one of the thousands of microsoft propaganda sites on the net and quietly bypass this "SUCK" site.
That's cool and all, but why would you name it "MSChess"? :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
For this reason, I do recommend learning HTML, and a little Perl as well, as a bare minimum.
XEmacs is a great tool for this purpose; it has color coding of HTML and Perl, and useful context-sensitive menus.
And, yes, I have worked for a web development company for years (although I mostly sysadmin these days). And I've tried many "WYSIWYG" tools, and found them all lacking. I had to spend as much time cleaning up their output as I ever could have hoped to save from not typing the tags.
I'm a bit disappointed in the "bash the geeks" nature of this thread, especially on a site that purports to be "News for Nerds." Opposing the use of "WYSIWYG" editors, and recommending that the questioner get his hands dirty and just learn the stuff is not only a legitimate answer, it is in his best interest in the long run.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
Umm.. does it have to be an either/or question? Can't a person know perl/emacs/html/sql AND know Dreamweaver? Isn't it a matter of (as someone above noted) using the best tool for the job?
I tend to do everything in XEmacs myself, but that's mostly for dynamic websites where most of the content is generated and for relatively simple pages. I tried dreamweaver this week on a page with lots (25+) of layers that responded to user clicks (hiding, showing, not much moving) and was *very* impressed. Using XEmacs on such a page was downright confusing, particularly because I wasn't the original author.
I don't necessarily think Dreamweaver is appropriate for everything. But it has its place. That place depends on the person -- someone more graphically inclined that I might be able to do a lot more with DW and less with XEmacs. Whatever.
Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode
..is emacs, vi, pico, or whatever text editing program that doesn't get in your way. You're much better off in the long run if the people who will be maintaining a site actually learn html & whatnot instead of having some dumbed down program do it for them.
Yeah, so it's really called GoLive 4, but who the hell cares. It was called Cyberstudio until stupid Adobe bought it, so that's what it is. And it's the best. W/o a doubt. You should be able to go to adobe.com and grab a demo, if not, try download.com and grab a 3.0 demo. 4.0 is better, but not by much. I don't have to run through why it's the best, all you have to do is use it and you'll agree.
If they don't belong, why are they defined?
What doesn't belong IMHO is draconian layout, enforced by a bunch of clear GIFs and other such kludges that are NOT defined in HTML. Layout does belong, it's PRESENTATION that is up to the user.
My favorite rule of thumb is that if frames and tables are too complex to lay out in HTML using a text editor, it's too complex anyway. Image maps are a different story, and should be generated by helper apps, and pasted into the document.
I'll reiterate the statements of others; there
is no substitute for a good web page editing
program than a normal text editor (cavaet:
anything that would add syntax highlighting,
ala emacs and numerous other programs is much
better, if only to catch the tags). Most of
the so-called WYSIWYG editors out there export
too much excess code that is needed, some of
which make or break the page on certain browsers.
Also, there is no such thing as WYSIWYG in
editing HTML; the fact that the end user has
the ability to modify how the final page
rendering works means that want you've see
is not what the end user sees.
As iterated on many HTML newsgroups, you should
aim to write HTML that validates well, and
check it's appearence under as many browser
situations that you can do; this will generally
guarentee that the page will be visible and
readible in *all* situations.
Now, the other unstated half of your question
is "What is a good web site management program?"
which *is* something you want to look for
in a commercial solution. I can't suggest
anything, but one feature I'd look for is
the ability to use any editor to edit the
web pages.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
It's relatively inexpensive, they have great tech support that gets back to you quickly, and have fast online upgrade downloads.
Check it out at Sausage Software.
-Smrf_Slyr U.S.A.
I guess the wysiwyg vs. text editors hides the real conflict, which is style vs. content.
On the text editors and content side, the style should be discrete and modest, in order not to draw attention from the content of the site.
On the wysiwyg and style side, the idea is that style should be so dominating, that the visitors never notice the lack of content.
This explains why the wysiwyg people think the text editor peoples home pages suck. They don't see the heavy stylistic elements designed to draw the attention, which is what they consider the goal of html. It works the other way too. The text editor people can't find the content on the wysiwyg peoples home pages, so they blame it on bad style.
Of course, on a good web page the style emphasises the content. Creating that kind of stuff requires different skills (which you can learn), but are not the least bit geeky. Geeks either threat the style as its own goal, or prefer to ignore it and focus on the content instead.
For a geek the advice must be: If you have any real content, use a text editor, and use html as a content markup language. If you want flash, learn html and related technologies, use a text editor, and implement the flash yourself.
This is a little off-topic as the original question was about GUI designer packages (not whether whether vi was better, chaps!). However, if you want to generate large amounts of HTML pages quickly from standard templates and have the facility to regenerate it after tweaking the template, other posters are right in recommending automation. (Personally, I hate any package that requires me to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard more than once per minute. :-)
I've used the m4 macro techniques outlined in the following references and find them excellent for standardising pages and removing the worst pains of handcoded HTML. Every day, I find new ways to extend them. The downsides are coping with m4's syntax requirements (mind your quotes!) and the initial work creating your macros. If this doesn't suit, try some of the many other HTML preprocessing utils (see Freshmeat).
As an aside, some of the nicest pages I've seen used extremely effective graphics way beyond what I could draw - but were a pain to load and use. I've seen simpler sites that did nifty things with TABLE layouts instead.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
I just use my favorite text editor...
Check out NoteTab Light if you're going to be
doing work in Windows. It has a lot of nifty stuff in it, including HTML tag auto-replace. That is, you type an opening tag and it automatically adds the closing tag, and so on. You can define your own libraries of functions to do with it too, or change the ones it has if you don't like it.
Well, can't say that I agree with your coding statement. Writing HTML isn't the same as programming, but on some level, I do think it is coding. In writing a web page you're coding the page for display in a browser. Whether you call it a mark up, or text formating language, I do think it is coding (at least if you're doing it "by hand").
And as for LaTeX...I agree fully. I think HTML is (and will continue to be) a real mess. It certainly seems to me that LaTeX could've easily been extended for handling web documents, and then we wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about making sure the page comes out right in every frigging browser in existence...the type setting engine would make sure that things came out right.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
I know Zope isn't an editor, per se; however, once you've done a tiny bit of thought to draw up the structure of your page, adding new stuff is SO trivial.
It's very hard to explain, but very easy to understand once you see it. Install a copy and see -- the distro installs quickly and painlessly, and works (by default) without intruding on your normal web server (if you have one). And yes, it works perfectly well on systems without connectivity (that's how I first evaluated it).
And best of all, you can access it from ANYWHERE, using any web browser which supports frames, forms, and passwords.
It doesn't let you drag and drop pictures: to add a picture, you click "picture", "add", "browse", and then choose it from your drive. I think that's close enough.
The only thing it doesn't have is WYSIWYG, but try it and you'll likely agree that such would only get in the way, especially since one sometimes wants to write a little bit of DTML (Zope code). It's just too useful.
-Billy
Why do so many ppl respond with vi or emacs or notepad.
The discussion was a cross platform wysiwyg editor for html pages. These are the days i wish i was mega moderator here and marked all vi/emacs/notepad messages as -10 they are all of topic. And messages like "vi nuff sayed" are just as bad as the happily long gone i'm the first poster message....
Met Vriendelijke groet/Yours Sincerly
Stijn Jonker
Met Vriendelijke groet/Yours Sincerly
Stijn Jonker
vi
Enough Said.
Since when is MacOS and Windows considered "cross platform"?
XEmacs.
Accept no substitute.
(Oh yeah, I am an HTML fascist. So what? you can make übercool pages with XEmacs too.)
I have been doing web stuff since 1996 or so, so these things aren't too unfamiliar...
I have just found that using raw text editors is NOT bad, NOT hard and NOT even a bad idea. Ever heard of template files? That's what the WYSIWYG programs basically use. With just a nice ^X^I, I drop the HTML template in, write the body, and there's my kewl page. With CSS, I can do the hard visual stuff much easier, and apply it to many pages very easily. Just as easy as opening stuff into the WYSIWYG program and clicking away, even easier in some cases.
And I certainly don't want to write CGI scripts in WYSIWYG drool-proof program - I use a real text editor.
Just to let the people know that XEmacs is the best one if you need to write for Web, no matter if the language is HTML, Perl or Java.
What's wrong with the Professionals? Are they afraid to admit that they won't even want to learn and obey simple languages like HTML and CSS? C'mon, writing standards-compliant HTML is not any harder than writing non-standards-compliant HTML! Why the people get shudders when we say "Standard compliance"? It isn't about inhaling the voluminous W3C HTML standard specifications and then trying to understand the basics, it's about using your brain and doing intelligent site designing, not just stuff that looks kewl on one place but crashes everywhere else.
Okay, take a look at my front page. Believe it or not, no k00l WYSIWYG stuff was used to create it. Just GNU Emacs (originally) and XEmacs.
BTW, your comment was, as it is said in foreign language, argumentum ad hominem. Lesson learned: Listen to what he's saying, don't look what he has done.
Adobe GoLive is tbe best, hands-down. However, since I think it's currently Mac-only, it won't work for you (you specified cross-platform, right?)
This said, GUI editors are a tool, not a crutch. Do your basic layout in them and get the content put in the pages, but when you're done with that don't forget to go back over them with a text editor. GUI editors are getting to the point where they can write very good code, but they aren't perfect (then again, the same can be said of any compiler; that's why people still use assembly to try and squeeze every last optimization out of their stuff).
For a text editor I'd recommend BBEdit by Bare Bones Software, but once again I think that might be Mac-only. Nonetheless, it's a very good tool for this sort of thing, and comes with many features specifically developed for working with HTML.
Emacs is definitly the best. It is the most powerful editor every. It edits anything and does everything.
No.
HTML shouldn't be used for formatting a web page.
If you want your page to look any better than just a plain grey text page, you need to make your site into one great big GIF. Need a link? imagemap. Simple enough?
Have a look at Amaya:
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
No MAC port, but it's C and the source is there.
Deleted
I'm a big fan of Sausage Software's HotDog. It is a code editor, which makes a lot of sense if you are one who likes to have full control over the page's code, but unlike a plain text editor, it adds a lot of very useful tools.
If I'm in a rush, and just need a quick WYSIWYG editor that generates very clean code, then I use Symantec's Visual Page. Most of the other visual editors I've seen generate very dirty code which, even though it may look okay in the browser, is a pain to edit manually later on.
Later.
People please. Tables are completely fine in HTML. They are crucial, in fact, to forming your page in an effective manner.
As far as layout not being a design consideration... what are you talking about? You think that HTML authors should just plop text on the screen and let the user format it? I think not.
If you dont like HTML, try this: www.gabocorp.com
PS: VIM rules!
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
Um, "markup language", "text formatting language", what's the diff?
/. on whether HTML was Turing complete. While the tiny amount I know isn't :), with garbage like Java or VBScript it most certainly is.
...
I recall a debate about a year ago on
I extract data from TeX documents all the time. And my interpreter never has any problems. Sure, a TeX document can be invalid, but so can HTML (and w/Javascript it can be downright hostile). PostScript is (I'm pretty sure) Turing complete too, and we never have any problems using that for all our documents at some point in their existence
I don't necessarily say that the file format transferred should even be LaTeX, I just said it should be TeX-based, so we could write pages the same civilized way we write everything else.
It's possible a somewhat more general TeX like language could be useful, since TeX is really for document processing rather than general publishing, but there's no reason to choose a standard that relies on humans writing such unreadable gobbledygook as HTML.
for expressing this. Oh well.
:) code.
I'm kinda peeved at all y'all who keep referring to writing HTML "code".
WHAT !?!?
C/C++ is code. Smalltalk is code. LISP is code. ML is code.
PERL is code. Tck/Tk is code. Python is code.
hell, even Java is (probably
....
HTML is a @#$%^& text formatting language, for God's sake!. I'll even concede that writing CGI/Perl web stuff is code. But I'm pretty sure you do that in emacs or vi, not Dreamweaver or whatever. No, Javascript doesn't count.
I had to write some HTML once. It sucked. It's a pain. It's terrible. What lunatic decided that HTML was an appropriate language with which to invent the Web? (rhetorical question, i know the history behind the http).
Hell, i'm using annoying HTML formatting in this post.
Referring to HTML as code puts you in the same catagory IMHO as Al Gore's "Open Source" website.
Speaking as a coder, I use LaTeX for all my text formatting needs. Wouldn't the web be much better if it was all LaTeX based?
Who's with me? Who wants to bring the glorious coders' revolution? We have nothing to lose but our chains!
But in the Windows world even the MS-DOS edit program is better than Notepad for editing HTML and that isn't particularly good. If you're using Windows you need to check out an alternative text editor that offers better facilities. You could try the Emacs for Win32 as I think emacs is one of the best text editors aroung for programming. There may be something better out there I don't know as I don't use Windows. But Notepad NO! It's a joke of an editor. When you think of the variety of editors on an average Linux installation and what do Microsoft give you - Notepad!
I'm sure the GPL would allow MS to include Emacs as long as they put the source to emacs on the CD too and didn't use any Emacs source in their applications. At least then they'd be a decent Editor for the Win32 platform. If they thought emacs was too difficult for their customers then they could port an open source editor similar but much more functional than notepad to Windows (e.g. NEdit). Again as long as they release the source with the CD and don't use the code in their other applications I can't see this causing any problems.
If an open source alternative to a free (as in included with Windows) application in Windows exists then why not make the most of it. It would benefit the Windows customers and it would generate a bit of good publicity for them as long as they stuck to the GPL. Of course, this is all too much to expect from them, but it would be good anyway.
That's if I used Windows, but as I don't either way I don't mind.
--
Front Page - doesn't screw up you code anymore! I've heard that a few times today. Is that the best thing people can say about it! Or is it just an MS troll keep posting these messages here trying to get people to use frontpage?
Well I wouldn't use a product with a history of screwing up code becasue it shows that it comes from a company that either:
doesn't care about standards, or
doesn't test their products throughly
I think MS falls into both of the above.
I've downloaded and installed Dreamweaver in VMware (haven't tried WINE yet - does it work?) and it works a treat. Certainly better than versions of front page that I've seen, however I've not seen FP2000, however I wouldn't buy from a company with a history of shoddy problems anyway.
--
It's not *that* bad! OK it's not the best tool to use for designing professional looking websites so it shouldn't be a consideration but it's OK for doing a few small quick pages and the HTML is clearly laid out so it's farily easy to modify with a text editor. It's free so what more do you want.
I used to use it a while back - not for designing web pages but for basic word processing. This was back in the days when Linux had no decent office apps and at least by saving the work in HTML meant I could take it and print ito out on any machine with a web browser on any platform.
But the reason it's not mentioned is it's not a serious alternative to the professional web design tools it would be great if someone made the new composer in mozilla an excellent cross platform open source design tool but I guess it probably won't be - it'll just be like the old one.
BTW if anyone from Netscape is reading - although the HTML generated in composer is OK it's not 100% valid. Run some code generated with composer through http://validator.w3.org/ and fix the bugs. Most are simple bugs such as not putting quotes around numbers in certain tags such as FONT SIZE=+1 instead of FONT SIZE="+1" - according toi the validator they should be there.
--
Linux- Xemacs
;)
Windows- notepad
AS emacs is available for Windows why would you want to use notepad? It's the worlds most basic and useless text editor. No line numbering, or remembering your indentation, no support for anything other than cut, copy and paste! Well in one of my earlier submissions I think MS should include one of the better GPLed editors with Windows - as long as they include the editors source and don't use the source in their own programs there's nothing to stop them.
Just look at the excellent editors availble out of the box on a standard Linux system then look at Windows - notepad!
Then again in Linux we don't have any WYSIWYG(IYUTIB) (if you use the included browser - as HTML can look different in different browsers of with different users settings) editors for web design (except of course Netscape Composer and a few of the office apps). So we have to brag about the text editors don't we
But expect Linux versions of the popular web suthoring tools shortly, or if not we'll use WINE or VMware.
--
Slashdot is not specifically for Linux users, its not even just for UNIX users it's for anyone who's interested.
It says:
Slashdot
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters
It's obvious that this stuff does matter to the person posting the question.
Yes I do know that Slashdot is mostly Linux users (I'm one myself - 100% winfree since 1996) but there's no notice when you enter the site saying - Windows users not welcome, we will not help you or take your views seriously. So if someone asks a question and we can offer help we should do so without engaging into a mighty piss take of Windows and loads of emacs r00lz and whatever. You can post this if you want but at least provide some justification for what you say.
--
Would dreamweaver for Linux be very popular. If there are people interested in a Linux port of this software then I could set up an online petition/feasability study and see how many people are interested in the software running on the Linux platform. If you're interested in the product Macromedia do have a free trial version of dreamweaver available from their website: http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/tri al/main.cgi
- -
If you'd like to try in out in WINE or VMware or you have Windows installed or own a mac.
Personally I'd like to see some shockwave DEVELOPMENT tools for Linux (not that I'd use shockwave on the wwweb but on an Intranet that's a different matter).
I'm not sure on Macromedias attitude on Linux. They do have a (shockwave) flash plugin for Linux and Solaris versions of Netscape which works quite well but it's still at beta 1 and it's been like that for ages. Have Macromedia just quickly released support for these platforms to keep the UNIX community quiet and to say that flash is a truely multi platform format, and then not plan to develop the plugin any further.
Granted, this plugin is still fairly stable for a beta, but it is not a full shockwave plugin as it doesn't support director, just flash. Also if Macromedia don't plan to develop this plugin any further newver versions of flash may not work with it in the future. Does anyone know if Macromedia are still supporting Linux/UNIX or were they not really serious in the first place.
BTW you can download the flash plugin from:
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/
My roommate has used NetObjects Fusion for a while, and I will willingly admit to messing around on his mac to play with it. I've also used FrontPage, which irritates me a great deal, partly because its interface doesn't jive with how I think.
The real big issue for me is that while tools in this category are all okay, you won't get better html, cgi, or java than that written by hard working nerds in cubicles. It'll likely be faster and smaller, if you get good nerds. My personal favorite is emacs, but then again, I don't maintain large corporate websites.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
I am a linux user, and have been for very long time, but I still use window at work. I have no choice! When I bring my work home, I almost always work in windows, too. But that doesn't mean Im not a Linux user. I'll bet a lot of people who read from work are in the same boat, also.
"Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue, Miss steaks eye kin knot sea"
I've wasted a lot of money trying about every product out there. NetObjects, Frontpage (95,97 and 2000), Hotmetal 3 AND 5, CoffeeCup, Homesite, and many others.
NetObjects was good for a while. NetObjects is not very flexible. They went private (used to be part if IBM or something) and kind of lost the innovative edge.
Frontpage butchers the code and makes it impossible to edit later. The real downer for me on Frontpage was the stupid "Microsoft" metatags it puts on every single html page you edit with it. It also seems to have a lot of bugs.
Hotmetal 5 really could be at the top of the list. The only problem is that a couple of employees bought the company last December right after Hotmetal 5 was released. It should have been an Alpha or Beta version. They are still sorting out the bugs. Support was really shaky until last month. In fact there was no support from Jan-Mar because someone wiped their support pages and they didn't have a backup. They seem to be revamping their beta programming and making their support page more responsive. What makes this product really stand out is that they are developing a product that has extensive support for both line editing style and WYSIWYG HTML authoring. It also has code checking that can be turned on and off. Maybe Hotmetal 6 will be the real deal.
A good text editor is mandatory no matter what HTML authoring tool you choose. Many times you want to view and edit the code outside a WYSIWYG environment. Sometimes you are writing scripts which is easier to do in a straight editor. AltraSoft (www.XEMACS.COM) has an excellent text editor with support for custom script tag coloring. Their products include " InfoDock (an advanced integrated development environment), the OO-Browser (the world's most flexible object-oriented code browser)". As an added bonus they are making these products Open Source real soon.
Dreamweaver 2 is simply the best. It can turn anyone into an HTML wizard. Built-in layering support allows for very sophisticated graphical layout. The floating toolbars can be a little intimidating at first but in short order you'll really start loving them. All the most advanced web authoring technologies are supported: CSS, XML, IFrames, etc. Dreamweaver is a tool that can make a novice look like a pro and turn a graphics artist into a web authoring god. The features are endless, the bugs are few, and the integrated suite of tools available from Macromedia is awesome. If you choose Dreamweaver 2 as your authoring tool also look at Fireworks, Macromedia's graphics editing tool. Really slick.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I highly reccommend Macromedia's product line:
Dreamweaver 2
FireWorks 2
Freehand 8.
All xplatform, and tuned to Web development.
Dreamweaver is *the* tool for design. Not only is it true WYSIWYG, it also does *not* reformat your code, is JavaScript extensible, has great site management, but also has direct support for Cold Fusion, WebObjects, etc, and if you're clever, you can add support for things like Zope as well.
As to the 'text editor' crowd:
"Using a text editor to code HTML pages is like doing page layout in raw Postscript."
Period.
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
See Dreamweaver.
I wonder, has any here actually *used* a modern tool? The days of Pagemill are *loooong* past on the pro circuit.
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
I can't believe the amount of people using notepad in windows. What is going on here? I'm on the first leg of my long journey into learning emacs, and I can clearly see just how powerful this baby is. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant.
Since HTML is a purely text based medium, how can you beat a scripting language whose main strength is manipulating text - perl and others - and a great text editor? The wysiwyg tools may get you started faster, but if you plan on doing this professionally, there is no avoiding learning what you need to learn. Knowing HTML, perl and emacs are highly portable skills which never become obsolete. Yes, it's hard to learn, but think of it as an investment. Skill at wysiwyg editors becomes obsolete with every new fad editor which comes out.
Let's put it this way. If you were hiring someone as a web developer, and you asked them what tools they used to develop web sites, would you hire the one that was a perl/emacs/html/sql expert, or a dreamweaver "expert"? You need to know the standards, inside and out, and you need to know the standards compliance level of the various browsers. There just isn't any substitute.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I am a Linux addict, and have been using it for about 3-4 years. I shout from the hilltops of it's benefits, how applications on Windows have comparable counterparts on Linux. Well.. html editors aint one of em'. Have to agree with you there. And since I'm not one to prove my manhood with the "Well I edited bat files with edlin!" sort of thing. I tend to you Macromedia's products on my NT box:). And it must be added that the only thing my NT box sees is html, saved to a shared partition so I may manipulate under Apache, and do my perl thang:). Rob. ps. check out todays err' yesterdays userfriendly, it will hit home with what you were saying:)
Awesome!
I often edit in Windoze as well. Dreamweaver seems pretty good (just started using it) but I also often use AolPress (hey, AOL didn't write it).
-- I may be paranoid, but I'm still alive
You raise a good point. However, good design can be and is done with text. For example, Freshmeat was likely designed with a text editor of some variety because the HTML of the pages is the output of PHP scripts. It is a nice looking, well designed page. There are others, many others. I'm not saying that text is a better way to go, that is purely a matter of personal taste. However I disagree with your suggestion that most pages designed with a text editor are particularly bad looking.
I have used at least 50 different HTML editors for linux, windows, and mac; of all of them I have not seen one WYSIWYG that doesn't generate the most god awful HTML seen by human or alien. ALL of them are a waste of any serious web developers money/time. Out of the plain text editors I've found one nice one for windows named Homesite. It allows semi-remote editing, great search & replace, projects, humongous code reference and great help files for HTML newbies. But I must admit that the best HTML editor I have encountered has been vim. The way the cursor moves along your last position, and the many different vi-key combinations available; once you learn it's wanders you can do almost anything in very limited time, not to mention it has wonderful syntax highlighting.
Quandary in the Making
Or if you're really a masochist, SimpleText.
Elvis knows that the only true way to master the full power of HTML without being bogged down by idiotic, gui-based utils is to write HTML by hand. Only then will you be free of the restrictions set in place by "Web Authoring Tools".
-slap
# wrote sig.txt, 23 lines, 31337 chars
When writing pages, the author does NOT control the final image, the customers client does that. As web page editors, we can only suggest the presentation elements.
When I teach courses on HTML, I pound on about HTML validators, such as http://validator.w3.org/ for correct (ie valid) HTML, and http://www.cast.org/bobby/ for accessibility issues (such as EM instead of I)
In my opinion, no WYSIWYG editor produces HTML that is valid for both HTML level 4 and accessibility!
By all means, use these tools, but be aware of the issues that they raise, and learn the coding so that you can correct their mistakes.
hmm... lemme see the masthead again.... ahh! "News for nerds..." not "news only for nerds who live in a linux centric world". Oh well! maybe next time :) :)
- Jaymz, who is also tied to windows at times, but is much happier in his native freeBSD and Linux
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
Could someone perhaps recommend me a good WYSIWYG HTML editor for linux or freebsd? :), but sometimes I want to get actual work done rather than fucking with HTML tags :) :)
Yes, I do know that I should use vi/emacs/pico (i prefer pico myself out of the above... sue me
"I'm sick of being tied to windows" (although i'll still have to boot it to test IE
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
I second the call for GoLive...I've professionally used it to design four corporate websites with extensive Javascript and DHTML. It meets an beats all the 'positive' qualities of Dreamweaver and is truely crossplatform with the coming release of GoLive 4 for Windows. GoLive is on of my critical applications along with CodeWarrior, and Photoshop.
Do you know if Mysql is a good database to learn to use with CGI? Pardon my ignorance...
a resounding yes, if only because there are so many examples around to learn from.
Take a look at most websites.... Take a good look at MOST open source sites. The HTML sucks. The largest opensource sites are pretty good but how many of the people on this page are running large sites. Did any of you code the GNOME, KDE, or Slashdot sites? I didn't think so. Yelling plain text at the top of you lungs is silly and best and elitist at worst. To put up a decent web page a person should not have to know the ins and outs of every browser available or the exact html code used. I use AbiWord for word processing and it uses XML for it's files. I DON'T, although I could, edit the documents with VI.
My point is this. HTML is a file format just like .doc for word or postscript or XML(they latter 2 are both text based!). I don't edit any of them by hand altough I could. HTML is generally best left to a WYSIWG tool that is writen specifically to make HTML for current browsers.
My old boss swears by dreamweaver!
I really like adobe pagemill 3.0. It is easy and allows me to do what I want. I want a very simple graphical html editor and it foots the bill.
matt
-- Matthew Johnson
Nod. Whenever I'm asked to recommend a web authoring package I reply, "emacs!" The more you want to use nesting tables, frames, animation, javascript, etc. the more you need something that won't make them easy.
/. because I don't have a personal page. There's nothing sufficiently interesting about me to warrant one yet. The pages I do for work are all gray with paragraphs of plain black text, and people are always asking for more of 'em because the information content is high and the clutter is low.)
(If someone has coded up an emacs mode to automagically generate horrible kaleidoscopic pages, I don't want to know.)
(No, I don't list a page on
I made a lot of sites, one of the thing i do for our company is sitedesign next to the technical stuff, like my site is made completely with Paintshop Pro 5 and Editplus.
...
:) thats why i did not post it here :)
I could use Photoshop, but since i see almost all functions similar with Paintshop - i find the smallest program (PSP5) the best.
Editplus, Editpad and Notepad are nice, though i like Editplus better since the macrolanguage built in and the autocompletion. Once you are used to that it is a great value in webdesign.
A brain and a good sense/feeling is needed as well to design websites.
The only prob i currently have is that i am a little bit off standards coz of the coding by myself.
This will be fixed by me very soon, and could be done using Netscape editor (load the file, save, and it will change whatever needed), or load in a html editor like dreamweaver.
If you want to do it the hard way, take it through a html validator and change whatever needed (is what i am going to do)
Non commercial websites made by PSP and Editplus, do not complain about compatibility since it is worked on, as well, those sites work in ALL browsers. OS/2 netscape, netscape X, MSIE, lynx,
freaker.amitville.com
www.darkblood.net
www.s-dreams.net
2zones.s-dreams.net
freaker.amitville.com/cv
www.darkblood.net/portas
more sites in portofolio of Similar Dreams, though very commercial
Freaker / TuC
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
well .. i am using quicktime 4 ..
...
:) though if you want so i can add a no music option in the page :)
the only thing i know it uses quicktime is because of the WAV file in the background music
guess you have some issues with your PC then
Freaker / TuC
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Grab a Text editor. Notepad works wonders.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Ironically enough, when I was in college (in my pre-Linux years :-) I got so fed up with fscking Word that I started writing my papers in HTML. I knew the syntax in my sleep so it was WAY faster and less hassle than trying to figure out what all those damn icons meant, and why, when I clicked "insert table" it turned my entire document into a table (or a bulleted list, or a right-justified, indented title, or whatever it felt like at the moment). Load it into netscape, and hit "Print". Plus, I could focus on the content, type in all the text, just adding paragraph tags between each paragraph, then worry about formatting when I was done.
For those of you in college (or high school) now, with a good grasp of html, try it! You'll forget you ever thought you needed a word processor. And hopefully, you'll forget about [shudder] emacs, too (proposed Emacs tagline: "You can do anything in Emacs, if only you could figure out how to do anything in Emacs!")
Cent 2 on this issue for me :-)
----------------------
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Works on IE4.5, MacOS8.51, QT4b22. Gee, QT crashes a Windows machine...
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
The feature list is impressive: supports WebDAV, interprocess communication with XML-RPC, support TCP/IP access for distributed computing as well as TCP/IP server and client capability, can serve http content from the object DB (static or dynamic) or the local filesystem, handles XML better than Java does, and has a great deal of groupware functionality plugged in. It even plays nice with Dreamweaver, and it runs under Linux with WINE.
The kernel of Frontier isn't open source, which is a pity. Most of the functionality, however, is available and fixes and improvements are available.
Frontier has a very powerful and clean language called Usertalk. Meatt Neuburg ons wrote an excellent book available from O'Rielly.
It's cool, check it out
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
IMHO, the best WYSIWIG editor today is Dreamweaver. It comes bundled with an excellent text editor, which is either BBEdit (Mac) oder Homesite (Wintendo).
This is a great bundle, because it allows you to focus on your strength, If you need tables, do them in Dreamweaver, if you need to convert lots of text, do it in BBEdit.
If you also get Fireworks, you have a nicely integrated package for all your graphics and html needs.
Of course, it is more pc to use vi and GIMP, but in terms of productivity, it is sometimes useful to have a tool like BBEdit around, which has awesome support for HTMl stuff, plus GREP searches, etc.
It would be cool, if Macromedia could release Dreamweaver for Linux and if Barebones could release BBEdit for Linux, because then I would see no need to use my old shabby Mac anymore...;-)
http://www.webmonkey.com/99/19/index1a. html
Evan Jones http://evanjones.ca/
There are a few problems with DreamWeaver.
- It leads you down a primrose path to incompatible code. The style sheets, javascript, etc. are not compatible enough for use without serious testing on every browser/OS combination you plan to suport. Make sure you know what it's putting in your documents!
- It doesn't do exact placement. Artists want to treat a WYSIWYG tool the way they would treat Photshop or Quark and just drag the image where it should go, but DW can only do this by using style sheets that don't work on all browsers. There is a conversion mode for turing things into tables, but it doesn't work when you have forms, javascript, or an especially complex layout.
- The rendering (as mentioned in the previous message) is not accurate. Things look different in DW than they do in any browser. You still have to preview everywhere.
- It is godawful slow, probably due to being partly built with the world's worst programming language, javascript.
I don't know if the competition is much better, but if you really want a tool that is easy for artists to use, you might do better elsewhere.
(In fairness, I must admit that I have a grudge against Macromedia because I once had to use Director. Total nightmare.)
2. If you really want to get serious about a site then you must understand HTML and browsers and more than likely Perl or PHP or ASP, etc plus some sort of database. This doesn't mean that others can't contribute who must rely on a WYSIWIG editor.
3. The Web is for everyone. Publishing a web page should be something anyone can do. The Web was invented out of a desire to make communication easier. Like it or not the Web is not a place for geeks alone. Every day it becomes more and more mainstream. So if I want to use Word to publish my thoughts then that's OK. I happen to prefer XEmacs though. ;-)
?. Has anyone found a good tool for managing a simple site using Linux? What I want is an IDE that lets me use XEmacs as an editor but helps me visualize the entire site. I know what some of you will say, "That's what ls, find and cd are for." but I think that an IDE might be a good place for a GUI when it comes to web development. This is true at least for prototyping, anyway. Then again an integtated system that makes managing HTML and code easier would be great. It could also incorporate those scripts that scan the site for dead links, timestamp changes, etc. A "thinking man's Frontpage".
Any thoughts?
Home site gives you very good control over the code. Can have custom tags only a couple of clicks away. Can run your pages through a proxy so that you can even test Embperl/PHP/etc pages locally before uploading them. Until I have time to write my own editor, homesite is my choice.
I'm glad to see someone else mention Symantec's VisualPage, which is my favorite GUI html editor (bar none). It's also cross-platform (in the Windows/MacOS sense anyway).
_Deirdre
Believe me, I was a die hard text only editor for web pages until I downloaded the v1.0 demo of Dreamweaver. Joe, joe, nothing but joe, who needed anything else?
That changed. For those who will bash a WYSIWYG editor just because it us WYSIWYG, go away, ignorant fools.
Dreamweaver is EXACTLY what you want it to be. EXACTLY. If you want WYSIWYG, you can use that aspect of it. If you want text editor, open up the HTML preview and edit there. If that isn't enough for you, install your own into its external editor support. I consider the WYSIWYG aspect of Dreamweaver more of a nice preview in which I can make quick edits than a cast-in-stone, only way to edit.
Furthermore, Dreamweaver does not CHANGE your code at all. Not one bit, literally, not unless you tell it to. I also find the code that it does generate is quite easy to read and logical. I will admit there are some quirks in DW that take getting used to but believe you me, those are miniscule compared (to the dark side of the force) to having to try to keep tables straight without the visual aspect. Being able to tab through the cells in a table and enter/modify the data that way more than makes up for having to remove a few stray CRs, clean up a link here and there, and remove the cell width definition.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
A lot of people on /. are saying to use some specific text editor. Some say UltraEdit, some say Notepad, some Emacs, and I say VI!!!!!!! Whichever text editor you choose, they are, combined with pencil+paper, the most powerful tool possible for creating web pages.
:>, Windows :( or even the Mac := switching between editor/browser is really a matter of a mouse click or CTRL-Z,%2. If that is too complicated for you than maybe you shouldn't be messing with computers/web pages in the first place.
Why? With just a little knowledge of some basic commands, you can create a fantastic web page, with all of the bells and whisles if you choose(or just pure information). You create directly at the level of the HTML, and get to choose the way to format it you want. Furthermore, most of the editing is just copy/pasting, and it takes little effort to make great results. Why use a mangled editor that trys to control your product for you?
The real reason is that if you use a text editor you will tend to use logical tags. This means that you format it according to BIG/SMALL, H1/H#, STRONG, EMPHASIS, CITATION, etc. This way, the end result will look great on all browsers and operating systems. An HTML editor will use physical font sizes, hard preformatted text, individual specific fonts, and strange colors. It will look good on your particle combination of resolution, browser, and os, but may look poor on another. With logical tags and a combination of whatever you want you can control the output very strongly and still create a lot of combatibility.
With any multitasking OS, whether that be Unix
Now that you've heard that about the text editor, here's my opinion about which one: VI! It runs on Windows, Mac, all the Unices, Amiga, Atari, DOS, etc. It's lightweight. It's jam-packed with all of the great features you'd expect in a text editor(syntax highlighting, searches, text transportation, etc). Tasks that might take you 3-4 mouse clicks plus typing in Notepad can be completed with a few keyboard strokes. It has lots of little commands to move the cursor around more efficiently and to save time. I've even seen versions that let you preview the HTML! It's a lot to learn, but with a little time you can master it. (Don't get me wrong, Emacs is great too if you like doing other stuff while you edit).
So the point is, whatever text editor you choose, you will have more control and will create a better end product than any layout tool can ever make.
-If you have something to say, say it directly!
Linux: Long live the source code.
Thats what I use... Im on windows though im not sure about Mac compatibility Ill explain why I say What I say.
They all are easy to use, cant get much easier than what they are and they perform well.
Dreamweaver: I love Templates Library and All the Suite management features also The pretty good code it generates for WYSIWYG, other things it has is SSI emulator which you have to love and good style sheet support.DHTML kicks in this program having tons of pre made behaviours that work extremely well and are very flexible, and also work in IE and NS.. finally!
Homesite: This program rules for editing your code, so its just right it has a design view but that will kill all formating, stick to Dreamweaver for visual stuff. Its integration of the code sweeper, preview mode style sheet support site management features as well as some fancy things here and there, I love the color coading especially usefull for people who also use JS PHP Perl and other laguages mixed in there it does all osrts of of cool things and the validator islightning fast, you also have to love search and replace feature.
TopStyle: Not out yet im using an alpha, im a tester, its only for win32 and all it does is style sheets and site management but it does what it does exellently fats easy keeps formating, its made by the same guy that made Homesite so you will notice resemblance to it, I think the program is so big its kind of over kill for editing style sheets but it will save you tons of time and keep everything by the standards if you use CSS, its a good tool tht is not totally needed but helps a lot.
These are my 3 favoutite tools I use all 3. but you only need this much power if you are going for proffessional stuff a BIG BIG job. The best tool though is knowing HTML4 and CSS1 and 2 so you can polish everything. You needto know this stuff and you HAVE to stick to the standards.
Kaoslord [quote goes here] define("slashdot purity","67.5");
Using Apche's SSI capabilities allows a page to maintain a consistant format across the entire domain. Other elementes such as CGI's and DHTML can foten be confined to sub files which are added aby the server dynamically. I suggest everyone viait my webpage and see what a little bit of perl coupled with Apache can do very quickly for a 17-year old.
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
I fully agree. Hotmetal is WYSIWYG, which is convenient for heavily graphic pages and tables, but also is very clean with HTML, and has a very good code (text) editor, plus the nice intermediate "tags" view. I think it's the best solution around: it has the advantages of frontpage-like solutions, but is also a very good tool for writing or tuning HTML directly.
After all, Softquad has a history as producer of SGML tools...
When I write a paper, I don't use word processor codes, so why when I want to make a website would I use HTML?
This is just another thing that holds linux back. It's people who think they are better then everyone else because they use vi for HTML.
WYSIWYG Editors, whichever one that may be, is what web design should be. I'd rather be worrying about things like site layout and so forth. I don't need to worry or care about the hex value for sky blue or candyapple red.
Linux- Xemacs
Windows- notepad
Full featured, robust, everything looks _exactly_ like what you tell it to, there are no plugs for their software, and it's fast. Able user required, idiots need not apply.
Yeah, that's one way to put it... one of the users at my ISP tried to use frontpage to make a simple 'Hello, my name is [Name here]' page, and it killed his whole 1 meg quota before it even got the HTML part fully installed. It added about 7 sub-directories, each with the same 30 or so little files in them, and dumped so much crap into the HTML codes that it didn't all fit. Just to stick one page with a single sentance on it on the web... This may not happen with people who are experienced at wrestling with frontpage, but since it was the first (and last) time the guy ever tried it out, he didn't know what 'features' to use, and probably left them at their default settings.
Just because someone want's a WYSIWIG tool does not mean that they do not know HTML. In many cases it means that they want to be more efficient, which makes an increasingly larger time difference with style sheets, DHTML, XML, etc as compared to a text editor. This is the same argument as CLI vs. GUI. Just because someone uses a GUI (a good one like GNOME, not one like mac or windows) does not mean that they don't know or don't want to know what's going on. It means they value their time more than some of you loud anti-change people. That being said, Dreamweaver is the best wysiwig editor out, the only one that writes readable code, and very good DHTML. I also use it instead of Word because style sheets and HTML give many more formating options that are just too counter-intuitive or unavailable in Word.
-- d'arcy poirot
Thanks for your well-reasoned arguments about DreamWeaver. I get so tired of the 'EMACS Rulz' statements, which are just as fluffy as a Microsoft press release.
freaker.amitville.com crashed IE4 on Win98, IE5 on WinNT, Netscape 4.51 on WinNT when loading the Quicktime plugin... I guess you haven't tried your site with QT4.
Netscape 4.51 on linux survived, but only because there is no Quicktime 4 plugin for linux.
I use the WWW Consortium's own editor, Amaya. Amaya is buggy, it crashes every once in a while. Amaya does keep its work saved in temporary files, so you can usually pick up right where you left off.
Amaya's bugs are more than made up by the fact that it generates very clean and portable HTML. That's what I consider more important than anything else.
Uhm, funny thing. A) I don't recall the "Editor Wars" of which you so authoritatively speak. B) Who declared emacs the winner? Statements like that prove nothing and serve only to hint at the age of the author. :) I would say that there are many people who prefer vi and many who prefer emacs. Each have their uses and should never be relegated to the status of winner or loser. I believe the question was one of which tool was best for site management. That itself calls for subjective opinion. Therefore, I shall give mine. I prefer Allaire's Homsite tool. I have not used any of thier other products, but this one seems to have everything I want and most importantly, the option of shutting off "features" that bug me. For those that seem to misunderstand, when you are dealing with site design, rather than a simple "Under construction, neon-flashing, here's-my-friends'-pages" mind-numbing excursion through oblivion, you need a tool to manages things like image/content/cgi trees. Such tools will follow all the links on your site and tell you if they're broken, determine the download "weight" of each page, etc. Sometimes I do show that I have an opinion...oh well. -Saint
have you ever had to manage an e-commerce site with 15,000 products with a plain text editor? And several people working on it at once? You want to deal with the frustration, waste of time and RSI that comes with it? Never.
If I was managing an e-commerce site with 15,000 products, I would stay really away from WYSIWYG HTML editors. I would use CGIs or custom-made programs or scripts to generate my static HTML files. Can you make scripts in FrontPage or DreamWeaver? Do you think Yahoo, which has thousands of static HTML pages is made in a WYSIWYG HTML editor? Hell, that would be VERY frustrating. No, they use Perl scripts to generate their pages from database.
The idea of creating a 15,000-products-e-commerce-site with DreamWeaver, Front Page or just about any HTML editor just makes me laugh.
Alejo.
try WML and the pain is over.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml
it rules and it's open source.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Scroll down to the bottom to see what they use. :)
-- John Truong
NetObjects Fusion myself, at least for DHTML and such things. It's Everywhere HTML works great for making dynamic pages. It's rather quick to learn and the help is pretty useful. The only disadvantage I have noticed so far is that if there is some part of the script that conflicts with another ie. two separate frames overlapping, it usually causes netscape to crash. IE just says theres an error in the code and wont run it. It also has a site manager to keep all your links and images organized. It makes DHTML a snap because there's no scripting, you click on a table, image, ect. and change it's properties or link it to some other element to change it's properties. It also handles rollovers well not to mention alot easier to work with than Macromedia Flash.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Why do you need Fireworks for transparents GIFs? Export your index color pic from Photoshop as a GIF 87a/89a
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Are you interested in a text editor or WYSIWYG editor?
As far as WYSIWYG I use Communicator 4.x it is not the best, but it wil alow you to easily throw up a page or two prety easily, and you do not have to learn vi or emacs to use it, or alot of difficult html. There are a few draw back with it as it does add funny stuff in the html, sometimes. It is as easy to use a a word processor thou> I showed a friend how to use it and he set up a web site for his church with it, and it looks pretty good, with tables and all.
as for text editors, if you are using *nix, I'd recommend nedit under X windows. It does syntax highlightnening of Java/Javascript and HTML, among other languages, and also allows you to add your own macros, and define new things to highlight, and change the colors. Best of all it is free and has a GUI.
Only 'flamers' flame!
The question itself bothers me.....let alone who wins the arguement.
I've tried Front Page 98, Dreamweaver, and Hotmetal. Hotmetal offers the most flexiblity of any of these and has a great accessibility checker that evaluates your code and tells you what features you have used that may not be renderable on certain browsers. It has three different editing modes. The common WYSIWYG, a great context senstive text mode, and a tags on WYSIWYG mode. In tags on mode you see small graphical representations of your html tags in the WYSIWYG display. This allows you to easily grab a tag and modify attributes or move it to another section of the document. Also, unlike Frontpage and Dreamweaver, Hotmetal doesn't insert any elements that you don't ask for. (try inserting a horizontal rule in Frontpage, you get a leading and following paragraph tag). SoftQuad also offers free updates to the rules files which allows you to update the html checker to the latest standard while still maintaining compatibility with the lowest level browser that you choose. It supports CSS in a convenient way (although it could be a little smarter) and comes packaged with a huge collection of media which SoftQuad calls "assets". You get many customizable javascripts, applets, animated gifs and more. It also comes with Unlead PhotoImpact and Unlead gif Animator. Plus you get a nice little server on which you can test your pages locally. The editing environment also provides nice site management and publishing features. Can you tell that I like it?
So far I've seen two types of comments:
a) Everything thats not plaintext sucks!
b) Use HomeSite!
c) Use Dreamweaver!
I've even seen some people bashing HomeSite and saying that you should use a plaintext editor in the same post (or in reply to a pro-Homesite post), which only demonstrates that they don't know that HomeSite *is* a plaintext editor, and makes them look like morons in the process. This small subset of people should be very thoroughly ignored. People that are bashing Dreamweaver without giving specific reasons (other than, all visula editors suck! They mess up your code!) should also be ignored. Pretty much everyone who has worked professionally with web pages has run across both of these programs on occasion, and should have some sort of valid critique. The reason is this: Dreamweaver doesn't mess with the code you wrote. It doesn't remove tags it doesn't understand. It doesn't change the tags you wrote unless you change them in the visual environment.
On top of this, it's got a built-in bare HTML widget, and ships with a high-powered external plaintext editor (on windows, at least; I've never used BBEdit). It produces CSS; it compensates for the drain bamage of the various browsers (iff you tell it to).
Of *course* you can't (yet) create an entire website within a graphical editor. The difference between Dreamweaver and, say, FrontPage is that Macromedia doesn't expect you to.
What are DWs drawbacks? They are twofold: the site management tools aren't all that great; the ones in HS are better. Two: the user interface leans far more toward flexibility than intuitiveness. If you know HTML, then the way things work within DW will make almost perfect sense from the start. If not, it's got a semi-steep learning curve.
Dreamweaver on Windows comes with HomeSite, which I can't go on enough about. It kicks ass. Color-coded HTML with with hyperlinked HTML ref, the ability to preview documents in IE in-place, buttons to insert things you may have forgotten the tags for (if you're a newbie) or don't feel like typing out (theoretically, if you're a pro). I've never used the little insert-X buttons, but they don't detract from the program. Pretty good site-management tools, too.
I haven't used GoLive. If the reputation of certain companies holds true, it's probably a kick-ass program. You might be going right(er) with GoLive, but you can't go wrong with Dreamweaver, that's all I'm sayin'.
-k.
qq!wq!^Q^C^D^H^S^Chelp^X^Hdamn.
-k. ^-^ ^D
First off, I'm rather disappointed at all the disingenious "Use a text editor" responses that have been popping up all over the place. Sure, using a text editor is a good way to start out and learn html, and even put a small webpage of your own together--that's what I did. But for larger-scale authoring, you need something more, be that a HTML editor, or perl scripts, or CGI, or what-have-you.
:) Emacs is available in all its glory for Windows. However, all its glory is a good 20-30 megs, zipped. If your hard drive doesn't have room for that much glory, there are Emacs clones available; the one I used most often was a program called NotGNU.
Frankly, you need to use the right tools for the job, whatever that job is. For me, when I was maintaining the 1998 Missouri State Square Dance Festival homepage, I did most of the large-scale gruntwork (formatting of scanned-in articles from snailmail newsletters) using Netscape Composer, then went back over it with a text editor to fix glitches and make tweaks. I could have done the whole thing in a text editor, but god how slow that would have been! Likewise, the pages would still have been presentable if I'd just used Composer, except some of Netscape's little irksome things would still have grated. So, I used each of them in its time, and it worked out pretty well.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else mention Netscape Composer.
Now, granted, Composer does a few annoying things, which means you generally have to go back over it with a text editor after you finish...but at least it produces HTML that you can go back over in an editor, not load upon load of machine-generated cruft like some editors. And it's more or less the same from platform to platform. It won't do the fancy things some HTML editors will...but you aren't exactly paying through the nose for it either.
On the matter of text editors...Emacs does rule. It would rule a lot more if I actually knew more about all the things it did, of course...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Heh, they finally changed the one thing that's been the biggest annoyance throughout the history of Notepad: instead of CTRL-F for Find, you had to go through the Edit Menu and choose Search. Ugh.
I always have my systems set up to send the file to UltraEdit whenever Notepad is called, so it doesn't effect me anyway, but you try and tell me that's not worth the price of the upgrade right there, baby! ;-)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
First, to answer your comments. I actually don't think your page is ugly -- it's got a nice, clean look to it -- but you've got to admit that it's incredibly simplistic, and I did say "and/or" when I made the comment about the pages. Like I said, doing a page like that is very trivial, so I can see why people like yourself don't understand why people use WYSIWYG tools for non-trivial pages.
About your content vs. design argument, I have to ask, "What's wrong with having both?"
Just to see the kind of output it created, I decided to recreate your web page using FrontPage 2000. And no, I didn't import your page into FP2K, I wrote my own from the ground up. Some notes about the process:
As for my own pages, they're all at client sites, and I'm not going to divulge my client list. Whether or not I know anything about page design doesn't change my point about the list of web pages that I posted; i.e., it's not going to make any of them less simplistic and/or less ugly. I'm not making any claims to be the God of HTML, just making an observation that the ones in this thread who seemed aggressively against WYSIWYG tools all had ugly and/or simplistic web pages. (Actually, that's not quite true -- I do have some personal pages that I've thrown up just to let some friends download music samples -- all done in vi only, and very ugly, I might add.
ESR's HTML Hell Page? Damn, I thought that was his home page. Talk about ugly! (Hey you cretins! I'm talking about his page, not his picture! Sheesh! ;-) )
Feel free to use that W3C-validated page I created if you want. You just need to take out that damned JavaScript block that Tripod automagically inserts into pages. Likewise, I'll take that page down right away if you'd prefer (all the links on it still point to your site) -- I just wanted to let you see what kind of HTML that FrontPage 2000 was spitting out.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Just take a look at the web pages designed by the "WYSIWYG editors are a crock for the ignorant!" crowd. Just for kicks, I took at the web pages of the people holding that attitude in this thread, and the most striking thing about all of them is how absolutely ugly and/or simplistic (read: uninteresting) they are -- usually just a bunch of links in a list, with a smattering of images. Wheeee! It's as if they're existing in a time warp from way back in the first year of the web, so I can understand them thinking that a text editor is the be-all-end-all in HTML design. One thing that is clear is that if any of these people's jobs depended on making quality web pages, they'd be out on the street begging for spare change. Hey, don't believe me? Just follow the links for yourself and see. The people coming out against WYSIWYG editors, who also had links to their own web pages:
In other words, for those of you complaining that WYSIWYG HTML editors are for unsophisticated dummies, I can only look at your own web pages and wonder just what your idea of sophistication is. If I had seen even one of you using some interesting HTML techniques, you might have a better chance of persuading me. Fact is, anybody can make ugly web pages, whether they're using vi or DreamWeaver, but most (not all) of the better-looking and interesting sites that I see out there are using tools other than just text editors. Most importantly, if you're going to come out and bash people for using WYSIWYG editors, you might wanna check your own sites first.
Me? FrontPage 2000 and DreamWeaver 2, using UltraEdit and vi for quick-and-dirty changes.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Slashdot isn't just Linux. It's really anything (Rob|Hemos|Nate|Cliff|et. al.) sees fit. While a lot of that happens to be Linux, anything that's "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters" is fair game for Slashdot. If there's an article that doesn't intrest you, nobody's forcing you to read it--just skip it over.
--
sharkyfour.com
Emacs is good, but XEmacs is better. It even checks your html for errors.
;)
Perhaps you should be more specific about "it". The default html-mode isn't too bright, but I've just discovered html-helper-mode, which is highly intelligent. I use it in conjuction with hitop, an html preprocessor.
The results may be found here.
Iain.
If you have to have an IDE, homesite is awsome, because it's the most non-GUI of 'em. WYSISYG is a crock. Any person can do a better job than one of those things (once they learn how).
You just have to test every f--- browser on the planet and Keep It Simple Stupid! Resist "browser sniffing" unless there is a clear reason for it. By the same token, don't ever ask the user to TELL YOU what browser they have - you should be able to sniff for that.
-=Julian=-
I use a venerable DOS shareware program called qe.exe (QuickEdit 2.06). It's dated 5/19/1988 and takes all of 48K. It always runs, never complains, is fast and pretty easy to use. There are a couple things I wish it did, but since I can run it on any M$ box from DOS 2.11 to NT 4.0, it's just fine.
There is a current version called The SemWare Editor which has a few more bells and whistles.
---------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
First, before I do my recommendations, let me ask why cross-platform compatibility is necessary? It's HTML, for godsakes! Which is to say that it's text. Okay, that said...
Text-only: SimpleText (Mac), NotePad (Win). (Don't use WordPad, which is basically a functioning annoyance/advertisement for Word.)
Text-only but w/ syntax coloring: BBEdit (Mac) is outstanding, but a lot of people already know this. Suffice it to say that BBEdit does much, much more than HTML. EditPlus (Win) is a kind of smarter NotePad. I only just discovered this shareware last week, while trying to find software for the Win-only office in which I'm employed to use for Web page composition. Currently, the group responsible for Web pages uses Lotus Notes for mark-up.
GUI: GoLive (Mac, and soon Win) is extremely nice. ColdFusion (Win) is supposedly good, but as I'm a Mac person I haven't had any experience with it except for a demo I tried at the office. (Comments, anyone?)
I'm a linux user myself, and yes most of the people that frequent Slashdot are also linux users... but Slashdot is not completely linux centric. Get over it, there are other operating systems out there. Luckily we aren't forced to use them.
---
iCab is an Essential for HTML editing, as it finds all of the HTML errors in one's page. Also it reloads the page one are working on as soon as one saves it. Because it is very standards compliant, I use only iCab to test my web pages. (also it is fun to say that the web page is optimised for a browser which no one has heard of.)
I have been using Dreamweaver 2 for months. I love it's site management piece and the 'gui' editor is the best I've seen.
.asp pages too well, particularly if you #INCLUDE multiple asp pages
Some strengths I like:
* Does the least amount of html code changing of any editor I've seen.
* Great browser compatibility checker
* Great site-management: Able to scan your 'site' and update links when you change the name of a file. You can 'lock' files when multiple users are working on a site. Works equally well with local drives as ftp for the site.
* Awesome support for tables
* Allows you to launch a preferred text editor of your choice (I like to use vim) wherever you want.
My only complaints about Dreamweaver are:
* Doesn't handle
* Aside from nbsp, doesn't seem to handle any extended characters like tm or an em-dash. I end up launching vim and putting in the ™ or — manually.
It ain't cheap, but Dreamweaver is great for getting results quickly. For the hardcore text-editor only webmasters out there: Check out dreamweaver. It lets you keep your html & edit it in text mode, but it also gives you a nice visual way to do it too.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Real programmers edit the inodes by hand. With magnets.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
BBEdit is indispensable. The Open/Save via FTP alone is worth the purchase price, especially when you're working on a web server that's colocated far away. My assistant is getting bitten in the ass by network latency every few keystrokes with SSH and vi, but I only deal with the network when I save. (We both work mostly on Perl CGI's that generate HTML. BBEdit understands the syntax for a number of common languages enough to do color-coding, brace matching, etc.) Plus it has real regular expressions for search and replace (with backreferences!), spell checking, a host of smart HTML tools, and (for those who need some WYSI in their WYG) it integrates seamlessly with Dreamweaver. (In fact, you get it free with Dreamweaver.)
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
Emacs is good, but XEmacs is better. It even checks your html for errors. Also worthy are gnotepad+ and Gedit.
However the best html editor and the best M$ widows program is (drum roll please) Arachnophilia. The closes Linux has to this is galway and August and neither work properly yet
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
IF you are smarter than a computer program you will benefit from using a non WYSIWYG program.
And everything cannot be done with such programs, also as technology evolves WYSIWYG programs become obsolete. Want to try CSS on the original FrontPage ?.
WYSIWYG is pointless as all web browsers display pages in different formats. So what you see is not what you get, also different users may configure their browsers in different ways. That is why the markup language is not supposed to do layouts also.
WYSIWYG is also pointless as some mutilate existing code, while others are just inefficient. Most have a fixed way of doing things that is at times idiotic. In short they are infernal contraptions.
Now html is about content over style. I do not visit Slashdot every night because of its style. In fact some of the originators were against images as it would distract people from reading.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
A nice high quality product, only weekness is it's damn FrontPage extensions which cause far more trouble then they are worth...
A nifty shareware program from India. Too bad it is only for Win 95/98 :-(
http://www.davecentral.com/3261.html
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Hey, I wrote some stuff (well, modified it actually) using echo and sed... does that make me a demireal programmer?..
--
--
Victor Danilchenko
I'm surprised that nobody here has mentioned frontier. Or at least a quick skimming and a search on frontier turned up nothing. Anyways, its not wysiwyg, but its extremely powerful. It allows for awesome templating capabilities so you can have monkeys populate large sites with little or no knowledge of HTML. Most monkeys know a little HTML, right? It has its own database, runs on both windows and macintosh and soon linux as well via wine, its pretty close to working now.
It has an intergrated database that isnt very hard to learn how to use. On the macintosh, where it was born, you can edit files directly out of its database in things like Dreamweaver or BBedit. This feature is coming to windows. You can also set it up as a server and have people submit content via file sharing, email, or ftp. There is even an extension someone has written that lets you edit files in the database from a web browser.
The closest thing to this type of environment that i've seen running on linux is Zope, but Frontier is, in my opinion, easier to learn and use. Also it doesnt rely on a web interface, which can be slow at times.
Anyways you can still download a free version of 5.0.1 from their site at www.userland.com. I'm not sure of the exact URL for the free download, but you can email me and I'll find it if you cant.
They are at version 6.0 right now, and the newer versions are no longer free. But 5.0.1 is still very powerfull, and FREE. I like free, so much i bought a licensed copy. Wait, that doesnt make sense. Anyways, Frontier rocks, Frontier is the best, all bow down to the power of Frontier!
....................
I use Adobe GoLive 4.0 for Mac (a Windows version is on its way). It does a great job of site management for a team of one or many. It makes a lot of JavScripting features easy to use (pre-loading of images, rollover effects).
It will also tell you which features work on which mainstream web browsers and their versions. So if you want to introduce a snazzy efect it'll let you know what you should and shouldn't use.
In addition to its WYSIWYG editor it a has a full featured code editor that does auto-indentation and colors various parts of code like emacs.
It supports full drag and drop from the Mac Finder (or from Windows' Explorer). This is what I use professionally.
-Brandon Lewis
-----------------------------------
Linux is free if your time is worth nothing.
Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing.
Having worked as a webmaster/webdesigner,with some projects having deadlines as short as 4 days from the day I got them, I can really say that no pure texteditor can compare to tools such as Dreamweaver and GoLive Cyberstudio. What WYSIWYG-editors do, is that they allow designers/artists to make the visual profile, instead of a "programmer". Having used both programs, I dont really see one as being superior over the other. Both have strengths and weaknessess, and complement each other. And now that Golive is being ported to Windows, one of the biggest drawbacks is being remedied. A port to Linux might be good, but since GIMP is not even close to being comparable to Photoshop, and there are no equivalent to ImageReady, I fail to see myself using Linux for that work. Besides, most webdesigners I know wont use Linux anyway, because its too clumsy and too technical for them. A more suited platform would be BeOS, since its more suited for Ease of Use and End-user power.
Anders W - Inquisitor of CoJ, Champion of Lady weeanna
One package for all your software needs: Emacs
I've been surprised for a while that there is no open source equivalent to say, Dreamweaver. I haven't even found a project in progress (I'd love to help), except for WebMaker for KDE, which is great, but much more of the HomeSite variety. Does the Mozilla project include Composer? I guess that'd be the best bet. Considering the amount of web work that goes on on linux, it's a shame we don't have a decent graphical editor.
As for the ongoing source code vs. WYSIWIG debate:
I do everything by hand, but I work on an online college newspaper that incorporates artists, programmers, and random volunteers. Do you guys really expect us to say "Yeah, thanks for volunteering, we're glad to see that you're an incredible graphic artist and a wiz at page layout, but get the hell out of here unless you're willing to learn HTML"? The fact is that everybody has his or her own style, and even I can appreciate the benefit of a graphical editor when you have to do tons of menial cutting and pasting in the midst of complex tables, or the like.
Personally, I haven't found one of these things that produces good html without mangling my php code. I tried Homesite once, but it was way too busy for my tastes. Dreamweaver looked cool, but it seemed a lot easier to me to just write the html than to try and figure out how to use drag and drop tools...
Indeed. And even if I did have to do that hell, I wouldn't trust a wysiwyg editor to organize it all for multiple users. The only way I could imagine keeping that sane is to use a cvs system.
So, two types of people here.. First, those who say a wysiwyg editor is superior for all web design needs. Seconds, those who say the same thing about text editors. I think it depends on the goal. For a casual web designer, wysiwgy editors probably work fine. Scroll down for their reasons why. They personally won't work for me. It doesn't take me long to write out a web page. The majority of the time spent isn't writing html, it's writing the content and planning the layout. I downloaded dreamweaver to try, but it doesn't speed up my work at all.
Where wysiwyg editor really fail is when you move from making web pages to designing dynamic sites and web based applications. Every web page I make is spread through three files. One holds attributes such as fonts, colors, etc. The second holds a template layout. The third holds code. This method has a lot of advantages, namely I can change attributes of a web page, the layout of a web page, or the code, without affecting the other parts. For large sites, I would thing gui tools would be a nightmare to manage the site,e specially when more than one person is using it.
I think every story get's at least on "Free beer, not free speech" response. I think someone out there has a perl script posting it....
well, the name kinda says it all, doesn't it?
the difference is the intent, and semantics. with a text-formatting language, you indend to format the text in a very particular way. with a markup language, you simply intend to denote which parts are of which type, letting something else later parse that logical markup for whatever purposes.
and this is the difference in practice. LaTeX defines things exactly, but html defines things loosely.
The best one I have used is Dreamveawer 2, but I use it mainly for layout and design.
When it comes to big sites (>100 pages) pure HTML is a bad way to create sites. There is no encapsualtion of code or re-use at all.
What I find myself doing now more and more often is writing objects and functions in serverside JavaScript that renders my HTML. (I REALLY like JavaScript. Such a clean language.)
Something like:
var title = "This is the title"
var body = "Beginning"
body += "Next item"
body += "Third Item etc."
page(title, content)
can render a LOT of HTML and is very simple to use and maintain. Especially those last minute changes of large protions of a site. Content and design is completely seperated
It's funny but it is kind of like every programmer forgets what he knows about good code design when doing HTML.
I found that when I did large sites they would always run late. Simply because there would be more ways for the pages in the site not to match. And then when something didn't macth it would take longer to correct because the sites where bigger.
Max M's 1. rule of webdesign: The time used to solve problems gets squared with size of the site.
This can be solved by looking at a website as a programming task, and then throw good software engineering practices at the problem.
Max M - IT's Mad Science
Pretty much the _only_ text editor.
Although others will beg to differ. If emacs doesn't run on it, it's not an OS, although it still might not be an OS even if emacs runs on it.
Oh, and a regular text-editor of course.. like vim or emacs or heck, edlin, whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy..
There is no easy way to make webpages that rock, except copy/paste. (Which incedentally is what htmlpp is good at :-)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I totally disagree. Yes, the majority of /. readers use Linux, but that hardly makes it Linux oriented. Last I checked slashdot ran stories on Linux, *BSD, BeOS, MacOS, and Windows (to make fun of). I think the /. community transcends operating system. As do many of the users. How many sigs have I seen bragging about how many OS's are on one harddrive.
Just to keep this on topic, I use a text editor and HTML Tidy. HTML Tidy is a great little program that checks and corrects your code and will do indenting if you want (and its cross platform). You can get it at http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy.
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
I've used homesite for over a year. Perhaps more than anything else that I like about it is the ability to customize. It even allows the importation of custom buttons, and has internal FTP. The HTML checking is smart, and it's table creation engine rocks. But most of all, it has really cool easter eggs!
-Woil
Again, this is worthless information for a post. If you want to use a text editor, then go ahead, fine by me. But have you ever had to manage an e-commerce site with 15,000 products with a plain text editor? And several people working on it at once? You want to deal with the frustration, waste of time and RSI that comes with it? Never.
It's incredibly difficult to do any kind of real web development without a sophisticated solution created *specifically* for the Web. Just like how I love using GIMP, but I create all my web graphics with Fireworks 2, because it's created from the ground-up with the Web in mind.
Phew!!
ditto.
Just to respond, here's me reasoning. I want to use Linux. I want to use it on a Pentium II machine. I also know that 85-90% of web users are using Windows. Hence, I have to use a PC with Windows *at least* some of the time to do testing, so I might as well use it to do a lot of my design, since all the tools I use are available on it. Plus, if I'm going to design a web page that 90% of the audience is going to be viewing in Windows, I am going to create it in Windows so that through the entire process I'm conscious of what my audience will really see. PC color palettes are darker, quirks between the browsers make differences, etc.
Not to say I wouldn't love to be designing natively in Linux or Mac (each for different reasons, preferably Linux because of stability), it's just not the reality I can work with now.
I'm dying for Macromedia to develop Dreamweaver for Linux, because it is honestly one of the few apps that keep me tied to Windows. I'm officially an "online media designer" and unofficially both a geek and art snob, and Dreamweaver fulfills all these wishes.
...
Honestly, for high-volume or high-quality/beauty web page creation, it is near-impossible to crack on about "use notepad/simpletext/blah blah". At least grab a full HTML-editor like BBEdit or, my favorite, HomeSite. They can fill any text gaps you may have, and are already integrated with Dreamweaver depending on your platform.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program
Helpful management stuff include:
Quickly and simply validates your whole site.
The one thing that isn't covered by this is a way to check all links in a site with a quick and easy command. I haven't really looked hard for this, but I hope to find time to eihter go find something or write it myself ...
I am a contract-oriented programmer who, unfortunately, must do design work (and in a rush, too) in order to get certain programming jobs. In those events, I don't have the time or desire to sit in front of a text editor and work the code by myself from scratch. It doesn't even make sense.
[snip]
I have to say I found your comment peculiar, to say the least. I have been working as a full time web developer/designer for the last three years. In the time I've had opportunity to try out many kinds of editors, from 'HTML editors' to 'WYSIWYG' editors.
And I have found them all lacking in usability. Actually, using a WYSIWYG program like FrontPage slows down the process of creating web sites. They might be good for sketching out something, but for serious creation or maintenance of sites, there is no chance that they would stand up to a good application server and a text editor.
And of course have to be mentioned that all of the software I use for web development is free. Midgard as the application server, Emacs with PSGML as the text editor used in sketching out layouts, and GIMP for creating graphics. only proprietary piece of software I need in my work is Netscape, and that will change when Mozilla approaches a usable status.
It also has to be remembered that WYSIWYG concept, good for normal print layouting, doesn't quite work with Web as we sites should be usable by a variety of different browsers and internet appliances.
All of this is IMO, of course.
--
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
Spoiler: Dreamweaver 2 wins.
Allaire's HomeSite4, asside from only being for the windows platfore, is hands-down the best tool to used. In terms of straight HTML editing, it has all the right features to help out: context highlighting, tag completion, list of tag properties, quick buttons for inserting tags, An amazing, multi-file search/replace, wizards (such as initial document wizard and table wizard), a great help file, internal browsing, spell check, and a boat load of other great features too numerous to list. Also, if you are intersted in WYSIWYG, the new version has this too. It is what I use at work and at school (for my job on a web design team for a major company and in my internet languages class). Great stuff, I love it.
As you're hearing, there is no best cross-platform authoring tool. Instead, I use a combination of things, depending on the need.
For general tweaking and finicky stuff, I use Allaire's Homesite. It's a nice, fast tool, with a great and useful help file.
For database preliminaries, I usually use Drumbeat 2000. It's an incredibly powerful database integration tool -- if you're using an NT server or somehow have access to ASP hosting. It is a good way of getting a new site 70% of the way there, complete with browser-detection scripts, CSS, and on and on. You still have to wade in with another editor to make things perfect, but it's way faster than doing it all by hand.
Finally, to manage the general layout of the site I use Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Again, a clean and speedy tool that lets me work both visually and directly with HTML code, without trying to hide things from me.
My $0.02.
P.
http://www.groksoup.com
Try Freeway from Softpress. This program is the PageMaker of web authoring tools (currently Mac only).
I prefer to write new layouts in emacs, then write scripts (shell,perl,m4) to generate pages using those layouts later.
-segfault
One big problem with FP98 is that for so many of the really cool things you can do with it, you need a server capable of handling front page extensions. If you are coding pages that will use those, FP98 is you only choice.
;-). Other than that, FP98 is great for designing some sites. However, when it comes to doing a large commercial site, I would take Dreamweaver over all! My only beef with it is that the FTP capabilities are somewhat weak. Still useful and it works most of the time, but it can have a hard time with really large uploads.
Also, contrary to popular belief, most servers are still UNIX based and do not support those extensions even though NT proved it was faster in fair and equal testing
/Sig/
I am a web developer for a company in Fredericksburg. I would highly recommend Dreamweaver. Go Live is really only marginally better and costs a little more than Macromedia. Plus when paired with Macromedia Fireworks, DW is a very powerful tool.
One reason it is so good is that it is true WYSIWYG. I have rarely seen any browser show a page any differently than it is shown in the workspace. Als, you can customize Dreamweaver. All your object bars can be changed to add actions you use regularly. DW will also write standard simple java scripts for things like rollovers and whatnot. Fireworks (The Macromedia vector graphics tool) will also export rollovers and regular images to DW.
I would also recommend looking into Allair's Net Objects Fusion. You get a very comparable (though not as feature rich) HTML editor and you get the ability to program cold fusion apps which is a sweet deal. If you don't need CF capabilities, check out Home Site which is allaire's editor stand alone. Considerably cheaper than both the products you were asking about.
You can d/l demos of dreamweaver, Net Objects Fusion , and Home Site from each company's homesite which I have listed below. You can also check out Fireworks.
If you already use Illustrator for vector graphics. Let me sing you the web praises of Fireworks. It has the best image export utility out there, handles vector graphics as well as Illustrator, and you can get a Dreamweaver/Fireworks package for a sweet price. Not to mention, FW is very geared to WEB graphics whereas Illustrator runs the gammut and is somewhat lacking in creating web graphics with exporting images. Fireworks can strip images down to such a small size it is incredible.
Also, while Amaya has allot of potential, it is still pretty spartan compared to what DW and Fusion are capable of. I have played with fusion a bit and it is certainly powerful, however most of what it can do, DW does as well. Plus, I like the interface of DW better than any of them, very intuative and user friendly.
Hope that helped.
Macromedia
Allaire
/Sig/
Having coded HTML by hand for about 3 years, I was convinced by a friend to give Dreamweaver a shot. It blew me away because of the following reasons:
There are a couple of negative points with the software however.
I haven't covered any of the DHTML and JavaSript-in-a-box features as I don't use them. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who does. Based on a little toying around, they seem very... er... verbose in their implementation.
Ultimately, Dreamweaver stands out for me as it definitely respects the developer who has a great deal of HTML knowledge and wants to maintain this control. If clean code, and fast development are you prime goals -- Dreamweaver is the one!
--
Rare Window - free your photos
Having used Dreamweaver since 1.0, on both the MAC, and PC platforms.... I must admit.. it's very easy to use, spits out beautiful, clean code...
:-)
Now.. Maybe we should consider kindly emailing macromedia, and begging them to port DreamWeaver to Linux... Or..I'd be happy if they ported it to Solaris..
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
I think that you'll find the groupware version of Cyberstudio to meet your needs better, especially if you're working with a very large site. I've used both products, as well as Fusion, and found Cyberstudio to have the largest feature set.
For example, Cyberstudio has a web-to-database interface that is unmatched, a great "Actions" interface that allows you to link DHTML and CSS actions, scenes, etc.
But the best feature is the group site-management features. For example, it allows you to move files around at will, renaming, reorganizing, directly over the network, while other people are accessing the site.
And just for the record, quite a few of the major design agencies have the same opinion...
--globalnap.net, product of pure caffeine--
vi
'Nuff said!
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Okay, this pisses me off a bit. There are certain areas where Linux is flat out lacking in software, and graphical HTML editors is one of them.
Because some linux users have their OS as a replacement for some kind of manhood or penis size in their own head, they cannot admit that Linux is lacking in certain areas, and so they insist you use a text editor for HTML.
I am a contract-oriented programmer who, unfortunately, must do design work (and in a rush, too) in order to get certain programming jobs. In those events, I don't have the time or desire to sit in front of a text editor and work the code by myself from scratch. It doesn't even make sense. I am fully able to put something together using a text editor. Most of my personal pages I do by hand, just so I don't get rusty with the code.
But how about a huge business website where someone is on the phone telling you changes as you are uploading the last changes they made?! HUH?!
Macromedia Dreamweaver 2 is far and away the best editor to use, and its quick code editor allows you to remain true to your code beginnings.
I personally have been harassing Macromedia for a Linux port. Anyone else want to join me?
-----------
open source everything
-----------
open source everything
Sure, we all remember when we had (or still do have) sites with "made using " but those times are gone, at least for me. Those of you who do web design professionally know that people do not pay you to take your time figuring out what combination of hexadecimal digits equals the perfect colour of blue. Web editors are just plain quicker, even though a little piece inside you dies every time you use em. But with ones such as GoLive you can do some really awesome web design AND not have to sell your soul to microsoft like everyone thinks! As for which one is the best editor, im not really sure, myself, I havent seen the most up-to-date features of many of em, but I can say that Frontpage aint it, no matter what people might tell you.
Vi in itself is a superior editor, while Vim with the syntax highlighting is all the better.
Amaya is a result of a project called Opera at the INRIA research institute in France, which is studying user interfaces for the editing of structured documents. (They also produced the thot editor and GRIF, a successful, commercial SGML editor.)
It may not meet everyone's needs, but is definitely work checking out, if only to see structured document editing done properly. Amaya also supports MathML, and has some preliminary support for Java and plugins.
This strikes me as a rather vague spec for a tool.
How about deciding on the feature set you need, and look for a tool that satisfies most of it?
-- chr
Personally, I use Notepad. IE5 is really nice and allows notepad support!
Should non-computer people really be making web pages? Really?
And should they really expect them to come out exactly right?
Don't send a typist (or a programmer) to do a designer's job.
I use FrontPage 98 on http://www.engl.unt.edu. At first, I did the site by hand, then I used FP's themes and navigation generators, then I went with shared borders. The site isn't exciting, but it's a snap to maintain because I can edit the left navigation pane and the top pane ONCE and all the pages are regenerated for me. I can move things around in the source directory, and FP redoes all the links. That would be a BITCH by hand, even for as few pages as I have.
In other words, FP98 (or any such tool, I imagine), enables me to have the functionality of scripts without having the scripts. Shared borders + stylesheets (such as is possible with &^%&^% Netscape) really helps me out a lot.
For fun, I'm trying to duplicate my needs with perl scripts (a dir with top.html, left.html, etc), and something that generates a navigation/site map sort of thing. Hard to do, as it looks slightly different for every page.
Then again, I think I use FP98 efficiently because I know about actual code, and learned CSS (and always revise when I find a newer, simpler way to do something).
SO, arguing about creating individual pages is not really the point, it's tools for site maintanance. Given a very small site: text editor. A medium site (like a University Department), FP98/DreamWeaver. A BIG site: scripts, database, etc.
Eh?
-K
I haven't tried the very latest versions of these, but the web was never designed for a WYSIWYG-ish editor, and most still don't give the control of plain text.
Also... I once rewrote a 10mb site, created with Frontpage, by hand, and without removing any content, took 4mb out (mostly in FONT tags). Other examples include stripping all the junk out a 125k file to get a more readable 25k file.
Excuse me, but tables are not a problem on Webpages. You claim that tables and frames should not be on a webpage, however tables were meant to hold tabular data and do serve their function in that way. They are not meant for layout, but they are useful on a page to display the appropriate data the way it was meant to be displayed. They are also useful to get your data across to those users on the internet who are not able to SEE the layout of the page. Using tables correctly can allow the blind internet bound community to receive the data on a page in the way that it was supposed to be delivered.
Jeff.
I have to go with HotDog 5.5. It isn't an advanced editor, and it is a little(it does not recognize a few tags)buggy, but overall its great. I have tried Dreamweaver2 and a few others, but I keep going back to HotDog5.
"Real men use text editors." Many are quick to bost that they do not use "visual" tools, etc. They are "hard-core" programmers (or at least they want you to think so). I have used everything from Notepad to Dreamweaver and Front Page, so I can share a little knowledge on the subject, and it goes something like this: Use the right tool for the job. Text editors shine when it comes to coding, esp. when you are doing scripting, etc. in your web page. They are good for doing basic design and even complex design (if you are good at HTML and are familiar with the time-saving features of your editor). HOWEVER, even the pros need to admit that a WYSIWYG editor can speed up making very design-centric web pages, esp. for someone who is not an HTML pro. The only thing to watch out for is editors like Front Page that add proprietary tags and info to your code. Stay away from that, as it's difficult to edit them when this happens. Dreamweaver produces clean code, so I like it. Lately I've become attached to HomeSite; it is smart enough to help speed up repetitive tasks, but lets you code your heart out and highlights syntax, etc. I use Dreamweaver when I want to do something without having to put a lot of time into it, or when I am focusing on design. Dreamweaver ships with a copy of HomeSite, so I think that is a great package. You can switch between the two, as necessary. If you are a real pro then maybe vi or Emacs is all you need, who knows. But I don't think that applies to most of us...(especially the ones who boast the loudest). Just some thoughts from someone who's been there...
--"A man's Palm is his best friend."
(IIIx, that is...hehehe)
real web designers/developers doesnt use notepad.
dreamweaver is the best visual html editor out there. Homesite is my second choice.
i thought the question was which html editor is the best/better.
u guys r comparing notepad to the commercial versions out there.
@$#@^%$#$@!!!!
Adobe Golive is definatly the superior WYSIWYG Web Authoring Program. I have been designing pages for about 2 years and out of all the programs this is the one I prefer. At a close second is DreamWeaver, but whatever you do don't use FrontPage. Everyone I've talked to in the Web Design Industry that was any good has agreed that FrontPage is a pathetic attempt for Microsoft to try and make another one of their oppressive 'standards'. So go with Adobe all the way... use GoLive and Photoshop for great web pages.
Sciophobia
cyko_1@hotmail.com
Text Editors like Emacs allow anyone to be a web author because they are available to all.
1.) Accessibility - Emacs is a standard feature of any shell account. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it's affordable to people on minimum wage.
2.) Platform independence - through a telnet window, Emacs offers you control of your site from any platform, any location (assuming it's on a telnet accessible server).
Emacs is versatile, accessible, location independent (through telnet), and runs on all major platforms (including MacOS).
I agree. I find that I can produce a quick page in Dreamweaver which I will later go in and sort out the code. I have been designing websites for years using text editors and would have until recently that I would use nothing else but know as I work as a web designer I don't have the time to hard code stuff completely. I choice Dreamweaver to get the shell for what I am doing and then edit it by hand.
One problem I have had with Dreamweaver is when I tried to edit a separate JavaScript file. It copmpletely rearranged the code for me which messed up the script. I will always use a text editer for all my JS files
I personally started using Microsoft Frontpage because I liked the WYSIWYG interface... I then moved on to the Corel product (sorry... can't remember it's name), and finally I became confident enough to use Dreamweaver.
I now use linux as my operating system, and any text editor to alter my HTML/PHP scripts. The only thing that I still have trouble with is the odd bit of Javascript, but I can get by.
Unless you are a complete starter, as I used to be, I can see no reason for using a product for generating your web pages. I like the flexability that I have editing the HTML by hand... not to mention the lack of wild quotes and loose
's that frontpage would often stick in there.
However, this is irrelecant to the question.
At work, the main tools used (except for the HTML) were illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks for the transparent gifs.
Call me a complete lamer if you must, but what is a *nic hacker ? I've seen the term a few times...
Well. As the subj sayes. GoLive have all the freatures you mentioned. And loads more (one of the really cool ones - although I don't really use it - is the ability to change URL's in QT movies and PDF's if you move things around in the site. Just like when you do it with HTML files).
Anyway. Personally I couldn't stand the first version of Dreamwaver. And so I stick with GoLive (although I haven't really looked into DW 2).
One thing I like about GoLive is that it don't try to do EVERYTHING for you. It is there to assist. But it gives you the freedom to decide most things yourself. And don't mess too much with it. (Unlike a certain M$ thing I could mention that I'm forced to use from time to time).
Frontpage 2000 looks pretty good for WYSIWYG..
It writes code pretty clean compared to eariler versions. I think it's always best to start with WYSIWYG, then take it to Homesite and clean up the code. It always counts to get a good visual perspective instead of the never-ending code/preview/code/preview.
I'm willing to bet a lot of people who vist Slashdot use Windows. It's the Linux people who post though. I use Windows 98 and I doubt I'll ever try Linux in the near future. I'm just a represenative of the public at large. I think on some FAQ page, Rob was saying that only about 10% of the daily hits on the main site read the threads, and only a smaller percentage of those posted. And the one's who know what they are doing (and hence use Linux) are the ones that post. It's like this forum is it's own little world filled with geeks.
I don't have a lot of experience in web design. I have a small homepage but I think that it looks clean and neat and is rather attractive looking. When I first started, I learned the old 'notepad.exe method'. Once I got decent with that, I tried MSFP. It didn't make any sense to me. It was totally not intuitive like a GUI should be... IMO, text editing really is easier!... --messiahXI
At least until Adobe's GoLive is available for both Mac and Windows. Dreamweaver is very productive, writes fairly clean HTML, and comes with Allaire's HomeSite (Windows) or BBEdit (Mac), both of which are very nice complementary text editors.
I'm in charge of a group of developers, and we put together four or five live commercial web sites every week. We use Dreamweaver and HomeSite, with either PHP3 or ASP on the back end, depending on the client and the project.
Hand-crafted HTML is great, but in the real world developers are paid for working, finished web SITES, not perfect HTML. Dreamweaver lets you change the HTML and it then redisplays your changes; it's "round-trip HTML" feature give you the best of generated and hand-written HTML.
Macho webmasters coding in Notepad are the modern equivalent of assembly language programmers railing against the morons coding in Fortran or C. Please, I don't need anyone telling me I'm not a real web developer, or how the web should and should not be used, etc.
Hey, I'm a quake freak so my judgement might be tainted... :) The way I like to do HTML. Is first getting the rough look that I want in a WSYWHITIGHLDKFJ editor. Then I clean it up in notepad. Cleaning everything. Putting in CSS, etc... Then I put it in my own system which has a header.js, and a footer.js In between is... The body/information of the page. It checks your browser, and its version. Your res. It finds out where you live.(Just about) Then it Loads just the right code. And if your browser is waaaay out dated, or you can't load javascript/jscript. It gives you info on getting a new browser. Hopfully when I switch over to my new host(I always talk about doing this but... I will somday...)I'm gunna make sure they have SSI cuz it sure would be nice :P Ya Synchronised Destruction 4eva! YA YA! :P hehehe (SD is my quake2 clan) Oops... went a lil off topic there c(O_o)o
-Ohmz I am the resistance! I am the Ohmz!
yes.
Personally, I've never really understood why the W3C has never revised the URLs to handle framesets....especially since HTML 4.0 doesn't allow for tags.
ufdraco
that should say "... allow for noframes tags." Urgh...I even used preview but missed that
ufdraco
:syntax on
'nuff said.
I use an HTML editor called Arachnophilia for all my web pages. It's simple to use, powerful, and highly customizable. And best of all, it doesn't cost money. Fundamentally, it's a text editor, but it has some really neat features. I think it's only for Win95/98/NT though.
Pure HTML. Writing pure HTML gives you total control over your web project, and if you combine it with pure JavaScript and pure CSS, you get an even better effect. HTML editors force you into templates, which you eventually have to alter in order to get your page to look nice.
To hell with WebMonkey's reviews, use the monkey's tutorials and crashcourses!
100,000 lemmings can't be wrong