MJ Ray wrote:
This one is almost perfect on standards support (as you'd expect) and that's something that D***mw***er doesn't seem to come close on yet.
The latest version of Dreamweaver is a lot better with this but I'm sure its not up the the standards of Amaya, I've become used to running all my HTML and CSS through W3C's validator anyway - it would be a lot nicer to have an editor that warns me when I'm writing invalid code though. I didn't know you'd used Dreamweaver slef, but your astericks suggest you don't like it much. Is this based on its non-free nature or just the program in general? I suspect you're not the kind of person who would use a WYSIWYG editor anyway! ;)
I couldn't get this one to produce valid and working code when I tried. Has it improved?
Not really, it's easy to use but produces some nasty code. The other thing is that the actual source of the page is on a different tab to the WYSIWYG interface and you don't appear to be able to use a split screen between the two. For someone who constantly switches between WYSIWYG and the source this can be very cumbersome.
It's not the job of an editor to shift files around. Do a job and do it well. Try a file manager, maybe either by copying to an FTP site (LUFS and AVFS may work properly one day, Emacs can open them, and I think gnome and KDE file managers can copy to FTP?), or a dedicated tool for it like xsitecopy.
Fair point, and yes Konquerer has the ability to copy to FTP and does it quite well. I just like the way Dreamweaver keeps a record of your "sites" and can check for broken links in files and check dependencies of files before uploading them. It can remember all the FTP details and automatically log in to a particular site with the click of a button and then its just a case of dragging and dropping. Perhaps I've been spoiled and should start doing things properly ;)
Is WYSIWYG for the web even possible? There is still a lot of scope for differences, even with the latest CSS standards.
For what I do, yes I think it is. I write HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript here and there and I've found that using a WYSIWYG interface for the HTML side of things increases my productivity greatly, and as long as I have access to the source code as well, I can do everything I need to - integrating scripts here and there.
Using a WYSIWYG editor can give you bad habits, I've found myself doing things the way the editor likes to do them - even if its not strictly the best way to do it, just to save time.
Perhaps if I'd never used a graphical interface I'd be quicker to code everything by hand - but I'm not sure. Writing web pages in vi might make me feel clever but its not as fast as dragging, dropping and clicking - and if the graphical editor is producing pretty decent code then why shouldn't I?
For a hard core developer who deals very little in static web pages the usefulness of a more graphical interface is most likely diminished - but in my opinion HTML itself is quite suited to development in a graphical environment.
QEmacs looks a promising graphical HTML editor to me, but it's a very early version and not easy to drive yet.
I'll have to keep an eye on this one.
-- Ben "tola" Francis