Dear LUGers,

I've been looking around and have tested four dedicated HTML editors including those recommended on list. I've only used each for a short amount of time but have formed some initial opinions.

BlueFish: A nice little app that actually seems quite powerful, has tools for php and sql. It has function to test your pages in various popular browsers, but no internal preview feature and although has a lot of features to speed up coding it doesn't have a WYSIWYG interface. With neither of these you're left pretty blind as to what the page will look like without having a browser open next to it and constantly refreshing the page. Has pretty good support for CSS and a dubious spell checker and word count along with customisable toolbars so you can have your most commonly used features to hand.

Quanta Plus: Seems a similar but more grown up editor than BlueFish. This one has a nice preview pane feature so you can have a split screen between the source and what the page will look like. It recognises and highlights PHP code and web sites are managed as "Projects" which is a nice touch. You can also get plugins for the editor some of which look very useful. However, still no WYSIWYG editor.

Amaya: W3C's offer of a web editor. This one boasts support for XHTML, MathML, SVG, SMIL and CSS. The majority of these I don't currently use on a regular basis (apart from CSS) but could well prove useful in the future. Amaya was the first WYSIWYG I saw and I wasn't impressed. Compared to what I've been used to in Dreamweaver its clunky and often has little resemblence to final rendered appearance of web pages. I didn't feel very happy with using Amaya. All of these editors are technically a work in progress, but this one felt like it needed a bit more progress!

Mozilla Composer: I've just recently tried this one, it has a much better WYSIWYG interface than Amaya. I really like the feel of it, seems like a much more polished interface. However, it's not as hot on features for hardcore editing as many of the others and lacks scope for a more technically minded developer. There's no highlighting of HTML tags, no recognition of PHP code and I can see me getting frustrated with a lack of flexibility.

In conclusion, taking Macromedia Dreamweaver MX as a benchmark (a status which I personally believe it deserves, despite its propriatory origins) choosing a Linux based editor is going to be a compromise. The Mozilla Composer WYSIWYG interface is very nice but Quanta Plus has more scope for serious coding. None of the editors I've seen have the advanced features for managing web sites that I'd like and I'm very much left to do things by myself - which is nice but time consuming.

If anyone knows of another editor that I could look at I'd love to hear about it, but short of Macromedia going open source or porting to Linux properly I think I'm a bit stuck as to what to use for the moment, I'll just have to make do with what's available. If I had the programming skills I'd love to start an open source project of my own, or contribute to another - but unfortunately I don't. Yet.

-- Ben "tola" Francis

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

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MJ Ray wrote: | Ben Francis ben@franci5.fsnet.co.uk wrote: | |>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 ;)

ive found, on our crappy ftp servers, dreamweaver uses a single thread, and CONSTANTLY locks up on me. Konquerer just politely informs me it's stalled.

konqueror's remember-urls feature isnt as slick, but saves typing ftp usernames out again. I just us it for upload, plus if you open a file on ftp server it downloads, and the then when you close it, it asks you if you want to upload it, handy for tryng to get a php site to work on an odd server....

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| Stylesheets mean that writing in a text editor can be pretty quick, at | least if it's a good text editor for HTML, and I find it even faster | than the drag/drop/click once the basics are set up. Setting up those | basics is still a big pain, though.

I use krite - bit too big, but good syntax highlighting, plus it highlights php too.

| The other assumption is that the editor produces pretty decent code and | I think we've already covered that ;-)

used dreamweaver for a bit, but it does things like absolute-width tables, and i have to go and rewrite the code anyway to get it all to scale right.

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- -- Tristan Scott Engineer 0800 computer Services Wenceslas House (Opp. Boundary pub) 355 Aylsham Road Norwich NR3 2RX Tel: 0800 0185237 Tel: 01603 442233 Fax: 01603 404410