Any Recommended Visual HTML Tools? [Archive]

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Jason Dunn

11-05-2002, 06:55 PM

Whenever I need some input, Thoughts readers give it, so I thought I'd ask this question: I'm looking for a relatively simple HTML tool that has both a visual WYSIWYG component and a raw code view. I've been using Dreamweaver for the 30 day trial period, but it's a pretty expensive application and largely overkill for what I need to do (I tried the old "Hey, toss me an unlock code and I'll talk about your app", but they weren't interested). I'm a little wary of FrontPage mucking up the code, so I'm not sure I want to go that route for editing. Any recommendations?

Charles Pickrell

11-05-2002, 07:37 PM

Jason,

Sorry to tell you this but Dreamweaver is the only way to go. I agree that it is really overpriced. But hey, so are Microsoft's office products. It is the latest trend.

arkman

11-05-2002, 07:43 PM

Homesite does a pretty good job of generating 'clean code'. It's listed on the Macromedia site as USD$99, but I'm sure you can find it somewhere else for cheaper. There is a 30 day demo available for download.

humor

11-05-2002, 07:44 PM

FYI - Frontpage 2002 does not reformat your code automatically like previous versions, it now defaults to not mucking with the code unless you choose the setting in page options.

Humor

Unreal32

11-05-2002, 07:44 PM

I always like coffeecup. Not the best, and no dreamweaver, but it works.

EHammer

11-05-2002, 08:02 PM

We have used Homesite (still using ver 4.0) for several years for creating a couple of websites we maintain as volunteers.

I'm a novice at HTML, but find it easy to use and it has plenty of features for what I need to do.

They used to be their own company, but were purchased by Macromedia.

bones

11-05-2002, 08:03 PM

Jason, Homesite has become somewhat of a standard now among front-end HTML, JS, PHP coders.

I found it for $77 USD here:

http://www.2buystore.com/shopdisplaydetail.asp?id=485244&Ref=CNET

Newsboy

11-05-2002, 08:14 PM

You may also want to try Moveable Type. It's free, except for professional use. And since you're not making a profit, I'd say you fall into that category. ;)

http://www.moveabletype.org

A good example of a Moveable Type website (I cannot vouch for content, just look/feel):

http://asmallvictory.net/bbp/

exsilio

11-05-2002, 08:15 PM

I've been building web sites for about seven years now, and I have been through DOZENS of HTML apps for the Mac and PC. Both raw coding and WYSIWYG flavors.

By far, the best for money and performance is:

AceHTML from Visicom Media. All sorts of great features. Personally, I wouldn't touch Homesite with a 10-foot keyboard. I know Homesite is popular, but be sure to take AceHTML for a spin before you decide.

http://www.visicommedia.com/acehtml/

Good luck. :wink:

weezl

11-05-2002, 08:36 PM

Frontpage 2002 has overcome the crappiness of the previous versions, and as a bonus, also supports VBA like the rest of office so you can write macros for common needs. You can now also set compatibility levels to avoid the old 'looks like hell in netscape, fine on IE'. A lot of people still slam it, but if you're just looking to quickly put together some HTML, it's a pretty nice tool.
(to be fair, I've not used dreamweaver or homesite for extended periods).

gregh

11-05-2002, 09:11 PM

dreamweaver is the way to go Jason. When I bought it though I paid a 'trade-up' from Frontpage license cost which was around $50-$75 I think.

Regards,

Greg

Wes Salmon

11-05-2002, 09:17 PM

I've been building in Homesite since the early 2.x versions back in mid nineties. In my opinion one of the better editors out there if you don't rely too heavily on WYSIWYG. (i.e. you're a code monkey)

jack in the box

11-05-2002, 09:19 PM

Jason,

I've tried plenty of HTML editors, of the "Free" ones I've tried I think that FirstPage is the best, available from www.evrsoft.com.

I also agree that homesite is a great package, but I still use Firstpage for all my stuff.

revolution.cx

11-05-2002, 09:24 PM

FrontPage 2002 has its problems, like all programs, but I have plenty of pages where I've added and edited the HTML and FrontPage leaves it alone. I cut and paste from FrontPage to HTML resources quite a bit and also use it to mock up HTML for use in my applications.

As you can see from the comments it's like asking people what PDA is best and getting drowned in the opinions.

Elad Yakobowicz

11-05-2002, 09:25 PM

Visual Editors?! Use Notepad like a real man! (just kidding of course) :lol:

Wuss912

11-05-2002, 09:38 PM

Visual Editors?! Use Notepad like a real man! (just kidding of course) :lol:
you are so kidding...
real men use VI

Rirath

11-05-2002, 09:41 PM

Dreamweaver.

peterawest

11-05-2002, 09:44 PM

You may also want to try Moveable Type... A good example of a Moveable Type website...

www.Broomeman.com is also made with Moveable Type. Take a look.

CUShane

11-05-2002, 09:44 PM

My personal favorite right now is Microsoft's Visual InterDev. It's part of Visual Studio but I think you can buy it as stand alone too.

pocketpcthemes.com

11-05-2002, 09:53 PM

Dreamweaver gets my vote. FrontPage has too many "bots" and components that require FP Server Extensions. Not to mention the endless creation of _vti* folders to muck up your site (if you've used FrontPage, you'll know what I'm talking about).

snowday

11-05-2002, 09:56 PM

Movabletype? Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of Movabletype, but that's a portal/blog platform - not really an HTML editor.

I'm looking for a relatively simple HTML tool that has both a visual WYSIWYG component and a raw code view.

Jason - use FrontPage 2002 and just don't tell anybody. Of course, for any heavy lifting, Dreamweaver is the only way to go. But - for popping open a simple HTML doc, and slamming some stuff in, FrontPage is hard to beat. It opens and closes quickly, has all the basic tools, and as many have pointed out - no longer mucks with the source code.

Most of the wonkiness with FrontPage happens if you try to build full "webs" or use the custom bot-tools. So just don't do that stuff. You never even have to touch or see that stuff if you just use FP to open/close single HTML docs. For that - FrontPage is great.

That's my setup - Dreamweaver for the "real" work, FrontPage for the quick single-file-editing stuff.

Newsboy

11-05-2002, 10:00 PM

Visual Editors?! Use Notepad like a real man! (just kidding of course) :lol:
you are so kidding...
real men use VI

Real men edit their web pages on a VAX system.

Mike Temporale

11-05-2002, 10:02 PM

I would vote for HomeSite or Visual InterDev. InterDev is great if you're doing any ASP work because it has an 'inteli-sense' for ASP commands. (Since you're not an ASP site, this feature is of no value to you... ) HomeSite is great at auto-completing tags. Very nice.

brntcrsp

11-05-2002, 10:21 PM

Real [noun (i.e. cats, mice, dogs, men women, gender neutral person)] use [your favorite text editor].

Dreamweaver is a wonderful and clean WYSIWYG editor. Homesite is a standard at many universities.

techie

11-05-2002, 10:21 PM

AKBishop

11-05-2002, 10:29 PM

Visual Editors?! Use Notepad like a real man! (just kidding of course) :lol:
you are so kidding...
real men use VI

Real men edit their web pages on a VAX system.

Actually, real men use ed on unix.
Its command set resembles line noise. Fun game - type your name in and see what happens.

Oh come on, I code everything on punch cards. I just got a new USB punch card reader and it rocks. ;-)

Can't wait for the iPAQ Punch Card Sleeve. I think HP said it should be out by New Years. Yay!

briaric

11-05-2002, 10:42 PM

Just started playing with open office.org apps. There is a .html edit with WYSIWYG I know the stuff is free so.... I think you have to download the whole thing but might be able to custom install just that app.

http://www.openoffice.org

RaySPNL

11-05-2002, 10:44 PM

Netobjects is very good too.

jpaq

11-05-2002, 10:47 PM

As recently as a year ago, when I was manageing website developement projects (lots and lots), my kids used Homeslice (Homesite). At least that was our nickname for it.

Seriously, Homesite worked well for our purposes. The autotag complete ws nice. The view tabs were convenient. All in all a good product.

adamz

11-05-2002, 11:33 PM

SirG

11-05-2002, 11:35 PM

I choose Dreamweaver MX above anything!

I've been making websites for many years now and tried just about every program that's out there... and nothing has the strength or the flexibility that Dreamweaver MX has.

szamot

11-06-2002, 12:20 AM

I use macromedia almost exclusively, and while my graphic editors change I never use anything else in place of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash. Stick with the pros it is rock solid and it works.

bdeli

11-06-2002, 12:29 AM

I say Dreamweaver MX. Do not get it directly from Macromedia. Amazon.com and Ecost.com offer cheaper prices.

As for Homesite, much of the program has been integrated into Dreamweaver mx.

someppcuser

11-06-2002, 01:22 AM

Simple editor? Just use the Composer that is included with Mozilla. The bonus is that you can add an extension that allows Composer to edit your textareas like in this very forum.

Buy Dreamweaver the day it really supports PHP & JSP...

Mike Wagstaff

11-06-2002, 01:40 AM

Here's another vote for FrontPage 2002. As long as you tell not to mess about with your code, it won't.

Deslock

11-06-2002, 03:12 AM

You asked for WYSIWYG and code view... for that I use Dreamweaver.

However, I generally prefer to edit code with other programs like Homesite, which has more functionality (Not all of its features have been incorporated into Dreamweaver, despite what Macromedia says).

On the freeware side, 1st Page is nice. It also has excellent tools for tidying up messy code. Since I'm straying from WYSIWYG in my post, Winsyntax also deserves mention since it's so small and fast and has nice default syntax highlighting that supports PHP.

alandashby

11-06-2002, 03:13 AM

Ok I think we all ought to help with this one, Jason needs Dreamweaver, we ought to get him a copy. I just checked the price on Macromedia’s site, the cost is about $400. I am sure you can get it cheaper somewhere else. Anyway, I know that PocketPcThoughts gets a lot of traffic if we all just pitch in it wont cost us hardly anything.

On the front page of PocketPcThoughts there is a donate through Pay Pal, I propose that everyone chip in a little and we will get Jason his copy of Dreamweaver.

Think about it how many times you come here for info, how much is it worth to keep it going. Just a dollar or two will get enough to get the software that is needed. Lets all pitch in and help.

Jason—we will just call it an early Christmas Present from the viewers of Pocket Pc Thoughts. :D

Alan D. Ashby
www.PocketPcInsider.NET

alandashby

11-06-2002, 03:19 AM

Just made my donation have you? :D

Jason Dunn

11-06-2002, 03:50 AM

Keep your money for now guys - there will be an opportunity to help support the site very soon, and you'll get some benefits from doing it as well. :-) (I really appreciate the thought though!)

scottd

11-06-2002, 04:17 AM

If you want a simple HTML editor then check out arachnophilia. I find it sinple to use and there is no need to spend lots of $$$$$. The product is careware.

http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/

Enjoy!

ScottD

rogben

11-06-2002, 04:25 AM

Since no one else has mentioned it... Adobe's GoLive is a solid product, head and shoulders above stuff like FrontPage and NetObjects. However, like any Adobe package, it ain't cheap.

Personally, I prefer Dreamweaver for the odd occasion when I need WYSIWYG. If the price is bugging you, bear in mind that DWMX includes a copy of Homesite+, which is essentially a merger of Homesite 5's codebase with Coldfusion Studio's RDS support... so you're really getting two packages in one.\

--
Roger

Warwick

11-06-2002, 06:30 AM

If you have visual studio you cant go past Interdev, it has wyswyg/code/online views. It also has a great online ofline file managment system.

But I wouldnt go buy VS just for that, its only if you have it already.

:)

Coralie

11-06-2002, 11:09 AM

my vote goes to homesite. i've been using it for a couple of years now & it's a great tool.

scottd is right about archnophilia though. i used it before i went to homesite. it's quite an excellent tool on it's own merit, let alone for one that's free. worth checking out anyway, if you don't want to shell out the dollars.

PJE

11-06-2002, 02:23 PM

Hi,

I use Interspector by Popup! Solutions - http://www.popupsolutions.com

This is a folding editor which allows an online preview of your html pages. One big thing it has is the ability to change the look of a complete website by changing the common macros used. It is very powerful - but you need to try it out (there is a demo) as it's almost impossible to explain.

The software makes a pretty good notepad replacement too!

Finally, the company is Canadian.... :wink:

Regards,

PJE

Daniel Webb

11-06-2002, 02:30 PM

You should definitely try netscape 7.

(Wow - I never thought I'd say that - been an ie man since win3.1)

I was forced to install netscape to fix a browser incompatibility issue. I've been very impressed ever since. Strike one for the opensource guys.

If you have ftp access to the website it seems really easy to edit the pages.

Unreal32

11-06-2002, 04:04 PM

Dreamweaver is a wonderful and clean WYSIWYG editor. Homesite is a standard at many universities.

Actually, I work as a software consultant for colleges and universities, and most of them use DreamWeaver now. Homesite at some, to be sure, but DreamWeaver at most. And almost no courses are taught for Homesite, whereas most schools (2- and 4-year) are teaching DreamWeaver now.

johncj

11-06-2002, 04:09 PM

Frontpage 11. Talk to your buddies at Microsoft. They can get you on the beta.

cptnshred

11-06-2002, 04:11 PM

I've always been able to get my hands on a copy of Dreamweaver, or Frontpage back in the day. My resident corporate expert, and good friend, just recommended a program called Topstyle. He said the guy who did Homesite moved on and created Topstyle. (For what it's worth - I haven't played with either one and have no firsthand knowledge here...)

Perry Reed

11-06-2002, 04:54 PM

My personal favorite for most HTML tasks is Dreamweaver MX. It works with most web environments, and will even work with ASP.Net. Although for that here at work I use Visual Studio .Net, which is also a very nice tool.

The easiest HTML editor, by far, is FrontPage. Use it if you really don't want to deal with the HTML itself at all.

The best free tool, in my opinion, is First Page 2000 from EvrSoft.

Kirkaiya

11-06-2002, 04:57 PM

Dreamweaver MX finally fixed the horrible user interface from previous versions, however it still does not work properly with IIS5 WebDAV. Actually it doesn't work at all. You still have to use FTP or a local network for publishing files.

Visual InterDev is great! I love it for doing SQL Server database edits in conjunction with ASP programming. But for simple and quick WYSIWYG editing, FrontPage 2002 is great. It doesn't muck up code unless you're using some of the "advanced" features (which no one should ever be allowed to use anyway) like the absolute positioning, VML, Javascript animations, and image rollovers. .... rest deleted ...

OMG! I don't even know where to start with this one. Nearly all web-publishing is done via FTP or a LAN (for intranets). While WebDAV has it's uses, not many production servers out there, probably including Jason's hosting provider's server, support WebDAV. Also - i don't think image-rollovers count as "advanced" anymore :P

Finally - absolute positioning, javascript for all kinds of client-side behaviors, etc, are default in Visual Studio .NET's IDE (I still use InterDev for quick edits, but I do mostly ASP.NET dev now), and FrontPage uses (clumsy) Javascript to add client-side behaviors also.

FrontPage 2002, and the beta for the upcoming version STILL suffer from one horrible flaw - if you do anything more than basic formatting in WYSIWYG mode, you end up with so much garbage code, that you can't clean it up without going into code view. Dreamweaver produces *much* cleaner HTML, which also results in smaller files (FrontPage will end up putting 400 empty span tags, etc, and lacks Dreamweaver's "remove tag" bottom-bar menu-item.

Jason - for what it's worth, I'm a freelance web-application developer, my main client is Microsoft (at least, they're the ones who pay on-time), and even for the internal sites I create for them, I don't use FrontPage, even though it's free for me. While I generally do everything in VS.NET, I use Dreamweaver for laying out tables, or cleaning up other people's pages (it has a nice "clean MS Word HTML" feature).

If you can't afford Dreamweaver, I would suggest looking at either Homesite, or one of the other editors that was mentioned. There's a good reason you won't find any professional web developers using FrontPage 2002. One of the biggest headaches I have to endure sometimes is when one of the Microsoft Marketing people calls me over to help them "fix" a page they've created in FrontPage for part of the external microsoft.com site (or for an internal email, etc), and I have to spend an hour cleaning the damn HTML up so that it displays correctly.

So now i'll tell you how I *really* feel !!!! *grin*

Kirk

JackTheTripper

11-06-2002, 06:01 PM

Coralie

11-06-2002, 11:01 PM

[snip] .. almost no courses are taught for Homesite, whereas most schools (2- and 4-year) are teaching DreamWeaver now.
that's because homesite is intuitive, whereas dreamweaver requires a phd just to make the tables behave as you want .. :roll:

MikeUnwired

11-21-2002, 09:24 PM

I have a full copy of Dreamweaver 4.0 that I bought, loaded and HATE. It's too much like work learning how to use it. I ran back to FrontPage as fast as I could. If you want to "buy" it, I can make you a fantastic deal as it is just gathering dust in my office storage area. I could use a extended battery for my AT&T Pocket PC Phone for instance.

I've been trying to figure out what it is I want to do with my web site area as I've transitioned from being a self employed consultant to working in management for FranklinCovey. So, I've just been using Blogger, but I think I may be fleshing-out a little more content -- but I'll definitely stick with FrontPage 2002 as I'm very comfortable with it at this point.

So, let me know...