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."

Comments

Web site design tool

[Anonymous Coward]

WebMonkey has a review of WYSISYG editors at

http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/19/index1a. html?tw=frontdoor

I've been using GoLive (nee CyberStudio) since version 2.0 and I'm pretty happy with it.

Remember, there is no such thing as WYSIWYG on WWW

[Masem]

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.

Dreamweaver 2 + Fireworks beats them all

[N8F8]

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.

Homesite is definately the best yet

[Pablopelos]

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.

Re:If not regular text ed. then...

[mr_burns]

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.

Dreamweaver and Homesite and economics...

[miscellaneous]

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.

The BEST argument for using WYSIWYG tools

[Zico]

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:

• Masem (http://pinky.wtower.com/mneylon/)
• quadra (http://quadra.demosoft.org/)
• jawsh (http://jcs.superblock.net/)
• doobie (http://www.doobie.org/)
• Azul (http://bachue.com/alejo/)
• Scott (http://www.gothic.net/~raindog/process/of/disasse mbly/)
• TypoDaemon (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/8955/)
• Haight6716 (http://www.julianhaight.com/)
• Mark Hughes (http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/) Okay, so this one's from yesterday's discussion on live updates of web pages, but after reading his quote, "We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it," and then seeing his web site, I just couldn't resist. :-)

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

Yes! Homesite! The next best thing to emacs..

[Haight6716]

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=-

Dreamweaver

[billpena]

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 ...

Dreamweaver 2 -- because....

[schmack]

Man, so many people are just writing "X product because it is good" -- hmmm, not so useful really.

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:

• Stylesheet Support: Stylesheets are the way of the future [if you don't believe me, read this article]. With Dreamweaver you can create or edit stylesheets very simply. Rather than trawl through CSS specs, you have a GUI approach which enables you to see all the available attributes. Applying stylesheets is great -- a style palette enables you to highlight text/tables/images etc. and simply click the class you wish to apply.
  
  
• Site Management: Dreamweaver is a great tool for editing existing sites. Once you've set up a definition [including ftp or filesystem details] you are presented with a tree of the website. Editing a page is as simple as a double clicking its icon. This will download the page as well as any 'dependancies' [images, stylesheets, etc]. You can also check in and out files if you have a number of developers working on the site.

• Source Integrity: Dreamweaver does write very clean source. Sure, it makes a few mistakes you get empty paragraphs and similar chunks floating around, but there are built-in clean up tools which work really well. Keep in mind, with Dreamweaver while you can work totally in WYSIWYG, it's an advantage to know HTML. Switching back and forth between the source and WYSIWYG panes is ultimately the best way to write swell HTML.

• Structure: Dreamweaver provides a structural outline of each page at the bottom of the main window. The plots out the major elements in the page and allows you to select parent objects to the one you're currently editing. If you were editting a cell in a table you'll see a map going back to the overall table row, and then table itself. Editing properties is acheived through a main palette which will intelligently present the attributes available. The metaphor for Dreamweaver is very similar to that of Cosmo Worlds -- really the only tool you won't to be creating VRML worlds with.

There are a couple of negative points with the software however.

• Dreamweaver -- like all WYSIWYG -- tries to appease you by building things as set in concrete as it can. For example you'll find it will tend to add widths to all your table cells. This can be a pain if you want flexible tables that will work with various screen resolutions. A bit of tidying in your text editor of choice may be required here.

• The rendering has its own quirks and variances from other browsers. So something you've designed WYSIWYG in Dreamweaver may appear differently in both Navigator and Explorer -- doh! Let's hope Mozilla rally them and provide the rendering engine for Dreamweaver 3.0.

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!

Wimps? Try making a REAL website buddy!

[black.flag]

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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