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."
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.
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'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:
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!
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
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.
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
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'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.
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
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
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
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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.