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."
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.
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
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.
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)
..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.
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.
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!
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/
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 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.
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
http://www.webmonkey.com/99/19/index1a. html
Evan Jones http://evanjones.ca/
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.
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");
That's all fine and well for "Hi, and welcome to my homepage on the Internet," but have fun with nested tables, extensive frames, image maps, etc.
I do those all the time for client sites, with nothing more advanced than pico. Really, a nested table is no different from anything else, if you pay attention to what you're doing. HTML is a simple standard, and if you follow it, even horribly complex pages like Slashdot are pretty easy to make. They may take a long time to type in, but the markup for it is really simple - you make a sketch of what you want, draw circles around the 'bits' to figure out their arrangement, and start typing. You'd be amazed how simple all of that stuff really is when you pick it apart before you write it down.
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.
Blink...
Damn, you're on the wrong site for someone who believes that... try doing a 'view source' on this page - I guarantee you'll see at least four table tags, possibly more, all used to format the text on the page into an easier to read layout.
Unfortunately, the idea that the user should be the one who decides on page layout is not one that goes into the planning of world wide web pages, any more than it goes into the planning of News Papers, Term Papers, Pamphlets, or any other media where information is presented to an audience. Layout and presentation affects how information is recieved, be it well or poorly, and knowing how to do proper layout can be the deciding factor between a web site being successful, and being ridiculed. Admittedly, knowing enough to not over-do the layout is a major factor, but even dumping a big pile of words on someone with no line breaks, paragraph separations, colours, collumns, or menus is still a decision about layout made by the site designer - and usually it's a bad one, since the site then becomes nigh-impossible to read.
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.
Dreamwaever is probably one of the only visual editors that doesn't suck entirely. It also ships with a great text editor (BBEdit on mac, HomeSite on windows). The difference in text editors here is not an issue, because they are both just working with text files.
Most other visual editors put all kinds of crap in your code, or embed tons of spacer gif's all over the place, making for large files that choke slow connections. Using DW with a text editor gives you powerful visual tools and real-time control over your code.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
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
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
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=-
No one has mentioned it because it is probalby one of the worse editors available on the market. The things that it does to your HTML is horrible. The university where I teach used to use it for an introduction course a few years ago... thankfully they came to their senses and now use a plain text editor.
---
Uhrm, excuse me, but I use LaTeX when I write my papers. And not wanting to worry about the hex values for colors means getting yourself one of the thousand tools available which do the color->rgb hex conversion for you, not necessarily using a WYSIWYG editor. Besides, I've yet to see a WYSIWYG editor that is truly WYSIWYG - most of them take hours to get something done, and even more if you want to fine-tune the result output from the editor on a text processor.
I for one know that the most important thing is control. That's why I chose Linux. That's why I edit my HTML by hand. And I don't think it's up to you to dictate what web design should be.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
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!
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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
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Linux is free if your time is worth nothing.
Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing.
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....
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
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
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
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/
I'll defend ya on this one... I agree, notepad
(or in my case, UltraEdit) is the best thing
going if you want complete compatibility...
I create a two large websites (for a newspaper
and a student organization at a university)
using nothing but UltraEdit, a text editor that
does nothing more then colour certain text
depending on their function (HREF's, etc. are
green, things between quotes are black, etc.)
I've never found a useful WYSIWYG editor out
there, but when I need something more, I just
simply get the barest product to do the job, and
type in the code that's needed for HTML (ie:
I get myself a simple freeware image map program,
make the image with Photoshop and then type in
the code...
Sure, if you want a crap website that doesn't
work 100% between IE and Netscape, and reads as
if it were an evil little devil, then go with
the new Microsoft website program... I'm not a 'hacker' (and especially not a *nix hacker), but I prefer using a text editor, anyday.
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
Exactly. Look is important, and that is what Style Sheets are there to fix. HTML is not designed nor supposed to do any of the nifty crap that it currently is.
Just because everyone abuses it dosen't make it right. There are now alternatives (CSS) that should be used instead of screwing up the HTML layout.
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--
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?
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open source everything
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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.
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