Yes and no. Go to Preferences - General - File Mapping, and you can tell it to open any file-type extension with any application, BB Edit for.htm and.html included. But if you want to do source editing in BB Edit and visual editing in GoLive, I don't see an automatic way to do that.
I have been using text editors for a while and lots of different visual editors since PageMill 1.0. On balance, I recommend Cyberstudio 4. First, you have to decide whether you are going to use a visual editor at all. There are good arguments against doing so, such as the "horrible, mangled code" mentioned above. Visual editors are never going to produce html code as easy for a hand-coder to read as code written by the hand-coder him or herself. And given the rate of progress of producing readable code (there has been some since Jan 96 when Pagemill came out), they're not going to satisfy the hard-core coder any time soon. Also, of course they are much more resource-intensive and less stable than a text editor. But if you are willing to learn the quirks of a particular visual editor, you can minimize the annoyance. Most, including GoLive, support a tag, so you can lock sections of code you don't want it to mess with. I usually use that on certain kinds of javascript or database markup language that it may mess up, and then leave the parts of the page with more complicated visual layouts for the visual editor. If you are willing to learn a little about what mistakes the visual editor makes, and when, you really can live with it. If you don't want to do that, then by all means, hand-code. But for that down side, you gain a lot of productivity.
Now, about Cyberstudio in particular:
1) Version 4 will still make visual changes to your code, but it's improved over version 3 at not making changes that break it. For example, it undertands entries between table rows, for example tags that web-enabled database servers use to return tables with a row for each hit. And at long last it closes its forms correctly. Also, there's a nice "tag outline" mode, which is a middle-ground between visual editing and hand-coding.
2) Site management is excellent. Most higher-end visual editors have some kind of ability to update/maintain link integrity across the whole site, but GoLive's works really well and intuitively. I use it to manage a site with 3,000 plus files. When you move a page or image, it shows you a list of pages that will be affected, and asks if you wanted to update any or all of them. You can define components for pages, which when changed will update across the entire site. There are several different useful ways to move through the site visually, lots of visual broken link/missing file warnings, etc. Find and replace supports grep, so you can do things like change all the text links to page 1, page 2, page 3 to gifs named page1.gif, page2,gif, etc., in one single operation.
3) Color management is great - you can pick a color off any pixel on the screen, in GoLive or in another app, and drop in on text, table cell background, etc., etc. You can define colors and then when you change them they update across the site, as you can with sets of fonts, urls, etc.
4) Its handling of tables is really quite good. I have never seen it do anything "just plain wrong." For example, it knows to take into account cell padding when calculating individual table cell widths out of the width of the whole table. Don't confuse this with its "layout grid" feature, speaking of which:
5) Features I don't use: GoLive, like some others, worst of all NetObjects, gives you the option of creating a page layout with "layout grids" which of course don't exist in HTML. They get translated into tables which I will readily admit are ugly and bloated. Fortunately, that's not its only mode (unless it's changed recently, that is NetObjects' only mode). I also don't like it writing javascripts for me. Those get bloated and harder to follow than straightforward ones you write yourself.
The interface is full of nice touches that you'll keep discovering -- just make sure you've got a big enough monitor to see all the tool palettes. It may not be for everybody, but if it's more important to you to get a lot of good sites done, rather than a few sites that have perfectly crafted html, GoLive. Final caveat, I've only worked with the Mac version. When the Windows port comes out (this month?), it's probably be buggy like the earlier versions of the Mac one were.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. Go to Preferences - General - File Mapping, and you can tell it to open any file-type extension with any application, BB Edit for .htm and .html included. But if you want to do source editing in BB Edit and visual editing in GoLive, I don't see an automatic way to do that.
AcousticSlide
I have been using text editors for a while and lots of different visual editors since PageMill 1.0. On balance, I recommend Cyberstudio 4. First, you have to decide whether you are going to use a visual editor at all. There are good arguments against doing so, such as the "horrible, mangled code" mentioned above. Visual editors are never going to produce html code as easy for a hand-coder to read as code written by the hand-coder him or herself. And given the rate of progress of producing readable code (there has been some since Jan 96 when Pagemill came out), they're not going to satisfy the hard-core coder any time soon. Also, of course they are much more resource-intensive and less stable than a text editor. But if you are willing to learn the quirks of a particular visual editor, you can minimize the annoyance. Most, including GoLive, support a tag, so you can lock sections of code you don't want it to mess with. I usually use that on certain kinds of javascript or database markup language that it may mess up, and then leave the parts of the page with more complicated visual layouts for the visual editor. If you are willing to learn a little about what mistakes the visual editor makes, and when, you really can live with it. If you don't want to do that, then by all means, hand-code. But for that down side, you gain a lot of productivity.
Now, about Cyberstudio in particular:
1) Version 4 will still make visual changes to your code, but it's improved over version 3 at not making changes that break it. For example, it undertands entries between table rows, for example tags that web-enabled database servers use to return tables with a row for each hit. And at long last it closes its forms correctly. Also, there's a nice "tag outline" mode, which is a middle-ground between visual editing and hand-coding.
2) Site management is excellent. Most higher-end visual editors have some kind of ability to update/maintain link integrity across the whole site, but GoLive's works really well and intuitively. I use it to manage a site with 3,000 plus files. When you move a page or image, it shows you a list of pages that will be affected, and asks if you wanted to update any or all of them. You can define components for pages, which when changed will update across the entire site. There are several different useful ways to move through the site visually, lots of visual broken link/missing file warnings, etc. Find and replace supports grep, so you can do things like change all the text links to page 1, page 2, page 3 to gifs named page1.gif, page2,gif, etc., in one single operation.
3) Color management is great - you can pick a color off any pixel on the screen, in GoLive or in another app, and drop in on text, table cell background, etc., etc. You can define colors and then when you change them they update across the site, as you can with sets of fonts, urls, etc.
4) Its handling of tables is really quite good. I have never seen it do anything "just plain wrong." For example, it knows to take into account cell padding when calculating individual table cell widths out of the width of the whole table. Don't confuse this with its "layout grid" feature, speaking of which:
5) Features I don't use: GoLive, like some others, worst of all NetObjects, gives you the option of creating a page layout with "layout grids" which of course don't exist in HTML. They get translated into tables which I will readily admit are ugly and bloated. Fortunately, that's not its only mode (unless it's changed recently, that is NetObjects' only mode). I also don't like it writing javascripts for me. Those get bloated and harder to follow than straightforward ones you write yourself.
The interface is full of nice touches that you'll keep discovering -- just make sure you've got a big enough monitor to see all the tool palettes. It may not be for everybody, but if it's more important to you to get a lot of good sites done, rather than a few sites that have perfectly crafted html, GoLive. Final caveat, I've only worked with the Mac version. When the Windows port comes out (this month?), it's probably be buggy like the earlier versions of the Mac one were.
Good luck.
- Acoustic Slide
Yeah, I'd call this one of the best short pieces of sci fi I've read in a long time.