Ask Slashdot: Which Web Authoring Tool is the Best? 375
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."
If not regular text ed. then... (Score:1)
When I just started I used Netscape Composer (a fact which embaresses me to this day).
One of the main features of Dreamweaver that is a dream for me is that I can still recognize my code when i'm done. Composer makes spaghetti out of it.
Text editors are fine, too, but for graphical tools go with Dreamweaver.
That said, I never used that other one...
try MS FrontPage (Score:1)
I'm not sure what the FrontPage Mac story is these days. I think there is a Mac version, but it's probably pretty old. Now that FrontPage is part of Office, perhaps MS will update the Mac port.
It runs just fine under VMWare, of course.
Re:The Best! (Score:1)
Please don't abuse the WWW any more than it already has been.
RE:best html editor (Score:1)
NetObjects Fusion lets you design pages and layouts with amazing ease very similar to a desktop publishing program. Can create and move images, textboxes, tables, anywhere on the page and reproduces them usually very suprising accurately in the finished HTML. And has a very neat and useful flowchart/tree view of your website. Only problem is that is creates messy HTML (like most wysiwyg editors). Some simple pages with a table and some text ended up being 13K. But if you want a prog that is easy to use, this may be the best!
Dreamweaver is very good too, almost as easy to use as Netobjects fusion.
Best bet it to use a text editor. You learn HTML better that with a wysiwyg edior, the html files are much smaller, and usually have better control over the layout. Use something other than notepad, it is crap and there are dozens of much better free ones you can download. I never understand why some people brag they use notepad-I would almost rather use any edior than that one. I rather like Gnome's notepad+.
L-man
HTML Editing (Score:1)
Take a long, hard look at yourselves (Score:1)
Re:Take a long, hard look at yourselves (Score:1)
GUI tools are good in situations where the users are unsophisticated, don't need to create lots of pages, or need to rapidly prototype designs. Over the long term, a text editor may be a better choice.
So while emacs is not the answer in all cases, neither is a GUI tool.
Re:Emacs? (Score:1)
> A) I don't recall the "Editor Wars" of which you so authoritatively speak.
> B) Who declared emacs the winner?
At LinuxExpo, there was an emacs vs. vi paintball war. Emacs won, therefore making it the definitive winner in the editor war. QED.
Re:Why do people still use text editors for HTML? (Score:1)
You may knock together a quick application in Visual Basic, but to get it running at a decent speed and efficiency, you use C++.
Same goes for HTML -
quick application
maximum efficiency
And note that using a text editor for HTML is a good idea, so long as the text editor is (X)EMACS - it has syntax highlighting for html entering, and even has a pretty speedy web browser BUILT IN as a module - so you are using a WYSIWYG editor, sortof - think of viewing in the internal web browser as a "print preview" mode...
It's not as if offical w3c spec HTML 4.0 + CSS1 is a very hard language to learn. My 14 year old brother downloaded the spec, read it, and started hand-coding right away, just like I did with 3.2 and 4.0, so it can't be hard unless you're really stupid. HTML only gets fscked up when one has to deal with the lame "features" of IE (and NS). Using frontpage (and composer) propagate these "features", since they craftily use them at every opportunity in an attempt at vendor lock-in.
Re:Pathetically inadequate (Score:1)
That being said, I agree with you 100 per cent that for web sites with a lot of repetitive, template+data content, such as slashdot, or a daily news site, a document-centric approach like frontpage or the other wysiwyg editors is unsuitable. Obviously if you want totally custom functionality, you are going to end up writing custom code.
A tale of two educational facilities (Score:1)
--
An example - at the college where I work, the "web page essentials" course that is being offered there is really taught as a "FrontPage 98" class - no real HTML is ever dealt with. They do this in order to teach web design in a "real world environment", since people working real jobs don't have the time to learn HTML, right?
At the same time, the local high school where I attended in the past is offering web page design in their computer labs... and guess what? They're using notepad.exe (So it's no vi... but its a start... ; )!
Both the college students and the high school students get one semester to learn this stuff.
The results? The student webpages at the college suck. I don't just mean graphical quality (that's a talent issue). I mean technical issues. Such as HTML that *breaks browsers*. Such as BMP and AOL ART files showing up all over the place. Such as 800x600 jpegs being resized to 150x100 IN THE HTML, leaving horrendous download times and aweful jaggies. Such as the inane misuse and abuse of "fphover.class". Such as missing graphics altogether (some students never fully understand that the default.htm and the graphics files are in fact *separate files* that need to be uploaded together!!!). The complete and total lack of understanding of the essentials of how the World Wide Web works after these students finish "web page essentials" disturbs me greatly.
At the same time, many of the high school pages render better than some "professional" sites that I've seen! If they're no good at making graphics, they at least have a grasp of how the graphics work (and many of them just get the class Photoshop whiz to whip up graphics for everybody). No BMPs or improperly resized graphics. I see some style sheets being used. A lot of the students take the time to validate their HTML and make it as browser compatible as they can. They use java and animated gifs sparingly. Some advanced students actually delve into CGI a bit. They've even installed PHP this semester on their server. They *know* that a web page functions differently than a Word file. And it shows.
After learning HTML, the high school students do mess with Netscape Composer, FrontPage, and Homesite a bit.
The high school students kick the college students' collective butts.
-Josh
Emacs - for a number of reasons (Score:2)
Firstly, if you are using a text editor of any kind, emacs is the obvious choice. I won't beat the dead horse as emacs won the editor wars years ago.
Now what I am about to say should be inviolate:
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
Maintaining a serious site requires heavy automation. No serious site today that I know of generates pages manually.
Use a tool to manage your data - perhaps a SQL database or XML, and then use tools like perl to translate that data to HTML. Do not simply create HTML - you will be very sorry later when you need to repurpose that data.
Tools like GoLive should only be used to prototype. Production pages should never come out of these WYSIWYG design tools.
Dreamweaver Vs. Emacs -- Why not both?? (Score:3)
There is nothing wrong with using a tool like dw to create all your HTML if you actually understand how the HTML works. Using DW I can create HTML pages that look descent and then I can concentrate on adding perl code to them.
DW is one of the main reasons that I have a NT box on my desk, well that and using it to administrate our SQL server db (shudder). The rest of the time I use linux to do my regular programming work.
I haven't used other tools so I don't have much of an opinion of them. I guess the best way to evaluate them is to look at the HTML they actually generate. If it looks like unreadable crap then don't bother, move on.
Web site design tool (Score:4)
http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/99/19/index1a
I've been using GoLive (nee CyberStudio) since version 2.0 and I'm pretty happy with it.
Re:Open source projects? (Score:1)
The Mozilla project does indeed include Composer [mozilla.org]. However, the need for a more powerful graphical editor in the same realm as Dreamweaver is great, IMHO. Composer could possibly be extended to provide such functionality, but its greatest strength in most cases is its simplicity... I'd hate to see that compromised. I'm assisting in the creation of the curriculum for a high-school-level class in Linux. Tentatively, one section of the class is on building Apache and managing a small Web presence. I'd like to couple the Web serving unit with a unit on Web design, but I'm in need of a design tool comparable to Dreamweaver, I believe. So, in essence, is anyone working on one? If I can't find a suitable application, I'd settle for running Dreamweaver within WINE. Has anyone experimented with this? The reports on WineHQ [winehq.com] are a bit sketchy.
Please read all of the words before replying. (Score:1)
You know, when people can't be bothered to fix their typos, that's one thing. When they reply without reading, that's another.
That's not what was said at all. Here's the relevant snippet:
It exceeded his disk quota, it didn't trash his provider's systems.
Another non-answer. (Score:2)
Not the point that was raised, as you well know. It is desirable to have the editor figure out the image size for you, because then you don't have to pull the image up in another tool to check it yourself.
God almighty. Let's say you want a specific green. You're saying you'd rather find it by trial and error with hex triplets than pick from a palette or move a few sliders? Liar.
No, it's not like saying that at all. I can't even begin to express how far off the mark you are with that comparison.
Yeah, but do you want to spend the time doing a chore that can be automated easily? I'd rather hit CTRL-Q to create a blockquote ... /blockquote pair than type the tag out manually. Especially if I had, say, five quotations to deal with. In fact, in putting tt tags around that last example, I accidentally left out the /, messing things up. A proper editor would handle that pointless housekeeping chore for me.
Who cares how the HTML comes out? As long as it conforms to the standard and does what you want, it doesn't matter. A proper Web-making tool could help you manage your sites, write (and verify) valid HTML with less manual labour, and maybe even clean up messes made by lesser authors with imperfect knowledge of the standard (or imperfect WYSIWYG toys). Yet you pretend you'd spurn such a tool.
What, you want me to believe you write all of your stuff (perfectly, the first time, of course) with cat? Nobody's impressed...
Re:Text editors... (Score:1)
Alex Bischoff
---
Why I use ASCII (Score:1)
The following is my opinion, and is based on information no more scientific than my own meandering experiences. If you think, even for a second, that this information should be considered canonical, take a healthy dose of reality and call me in the morning. This is my opinion. Try it for yourself.
I have always preferred coding web pages using nothing more complicated than vi for Linux, or Notepad for Windows. Those who extoll WYSIWIG editors tend to emphasise all the "cool stuff" you can do with them. I remind you that those "cool things" are still implemented with plain old HTML code, which I can crank out just as well. As much as I would like to show you some examples of my work, they are all on my home box, connected via 33.6 modem. I predict that my machine would begin to blow up about 1/4 second after being linked to here. I have no desire to be slashdotted today, thank you very much :)
Oh, also, please don't take the page shown with my user info as any indication of my current design skills. Those pages were made several years ago, and were my first attempts at HTML. They suck large by today's standards
My main reason to go simple ASCII is this: I know exactly what is going on under the hood. If something isn't working cross-browser or cross-platform, I know exactly how the code is written, and how to re-write it to make it portable. With WYSISIG editors, you are often left wondering "How the fsck did it do this, and how can I fix it?" Or at least, that's what I've experienced.
Remember, this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
- Adam Schumachercybershoe@mindless.com
pico! (Score:1)
Just kidding. I'm rather fond of BB Edit, and although I don't generally use GUI editors myself, if I did, I'd go with GoLive (formerly GoLive CyberStudio, now Adobe GoLive).
Pathetically inadequate (Score:2)
Instead I use Sitebot [airwindows.com] for the job. Stands to reason, after all I wrote it. It's a Mac program, but since the source [airwindows.com] is GPLed and online, anyone who wants to take any or all of it and make a Linux program out of it is quite welcome to do so.
At any rate, when you talk about elegant handling of site management, I have to laugh, because _none_ of the WYSIWYG tools _or_ a plain text editor is really up to the task. I use Sitebot, and Slashdot uses perl scripts, and any really serious site with a lot of content is _forced_ to use something suitable, otherwise it just won't be possible to manage the site at all. This means scripting or some form of site compiling- sitebot is more the latter and works from a directory structure on my hard disk. You can also use stuff like Frontier or Slashdot's perl scripts to dynamically generate the pages from a collection of data.
That data is not HTML, and this is the key point you're missing. It's just not feasible to have your actual data be in HTML. Instead it needs to be something editable and workable which is _turned_ into HTML as needed, producing HTML pages that are either disposable (Slashdot's generate-on-the-fly pages) or freely replaceable (my SiteBot's output, overwritten every time I run the bot- the original data is never touched.)
Do you understand this yet? 20 pages is _nothing_. 20 pages is corporate HTML art wankery-ville. Try 200 or 2000 and see how you do. At a certain point you hit a paradigm shift. Do you think news.com uses FrontPage? They, too, are using some custom software. Hell, man, even MSNBC is not using FrontPage. FRONTPAGE IS NOT SERIOUS, and to some extent neither is a standalone text editor all by itself- when you start dealing with really _demanding_ web tasks, it becomes specialized software, and the data you feed it might well be handled in a text editor- or you could be generating the data in a word processor and having the software translate the styling to HTML. But you won't be using FrontPage: it is inadequate.
Auto-generated (Score:3)
My approach to generating airwindows.com is to put _structural_ markup in the data files. In other words, I have pages with text information (and inline HTML if I like) on them, and the first two lines are header lines in a special format which gives the title and a summary of the page. These two headers turned out to be enough for my purposes, but others might find use for more elaborate headers. The point is, the headers don't go into the HTML, they are used to direct the _tool_ that's generating the HTML, and can produce more intelligent references to the page from other pages, or give fine-grained control over the whole structure of the resulting site.
I'll repeat the key phrase beause it's so right and worth repeating-
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
That could be done on the fly by Perl scripts like slashdot, or it can be done on your own machine whereupon you just re-upload all the pages or whichever set of pages is affected by the most recent update- but the auto-generating is a must.
An example (not live on the web yet)- I use iCab as a browser. It has a smily-frowny face feature (invariably frowny) regarding HTML compliance as stated in the page. If the page has errors, iCab makes a frowny and can give you an error report telling you what errors were found.
I went to my site with this tool, and found that it was giving lots of errors. This was partly because I'm doing HTML 3.2, on purpose, and am not enthusiastic about HTML 4 at all. I went into SiteBot and started changing code. After adding a comment that tells browsers the site is 3.2, most errors went away as the code _was_ correct HTML for 3.2, but there were a few details, a table tag that Netscape accepted that wasn't technically legal, minor stuff. I edited Sitebot's code some more and fixed that too, and rebuilt the site.
There are 384 items in the airwindows.com folder. That equates to somewhat less than 180 pages all told. _All_ were fixed by the changes, effortlessly. With a pure text editor you'd at least be composing massive search and replaces- and God knows what you'd have to deal with in a WYSIWYG, it'd be really ugly. Instead, the data is separate and the whole site is ready, next time I add new content and re-upload it, to switch to total HTML compliance and alert browsers to exactly what sort of parsing it will be needing.
Any serious organizational web page should be auto-generated.
Period.
Re:Windows and Mac OS (Score:1)
forget that crap- go emacs! (Score:1)
Emacs is the best for html. now I know there are some features that it doesn't have- such as color wheels, automatic image insertion, etc. etc. But its macro system more than makes up for that.
Re:Dreamweaver.. definitly! (Score:1)
I've already talked to them about a port to BeOS. They said that their design team would examine the OS to determinte feasability of the port, and then the management types would have a go at figuring out the market for it. I'm sure you'll get a simmilar answer for a linux port
---
Donald Roeber
Re:Dreamweaver Vs. Emacs -- Why not both?? (Score:1)
I agree completely. Dreamweaver has written some of the most highly readable HTML (in a text editor) i have ever seen from a WYSIWYG HTML authoring tool. However, my recommendation is to try out fte (and xfte) for linux. It is a very impressive coding text editor and highlights code as well as has some neat tools built into the program. Works great for HTML, C, PERL, etc.. check it out. (sorry you'll have to search for it
Dreamweaver 2 (Score:1)
The best tool is Dreamweaver 2 for the Mac. It comes with BBEdit 5, which is by far the best HTML text editor. The Windows version of Dreamweaver comes with Homesite, which is adequate but not something you'd want to use every day. Dreamweaver in conjunction with Fireworks is particularly productive. It also has very useful built-in FTP transfer functions.
The only bad thing about Dreamweaver is that it has far too many windows, so if you haven't got at least a 21" screen you'll find that you're moving and closing windows a lot of the time. GoLive is much more elegant in this respect, having tabbed windows. Having too many windows is a problem with other Macromedia apps like Director as well. Hopefully, Macromedia will sort this out with the next release.
Re:The Best! (Score:1)
You use Notepad? You really want to get hold of PFE [lancs.ac.uk]. It's free and damn good for general editing.
Web-Authoring Programs Are For Morons... (Score:2)
Anyone who has taken a look at a site produced by a so-called WYSIWYG Web editor knows two things; 1) HTML produced with a Wysiwig editor is full of redundant tags which blow out the size of the document and thus waste bandwidth and download time. 2) Sites pruduced with these editors all have a pro-forma appearance; they LOOK like they were made in a web authoring package. Sorry, but IMNSHO there is nothing to beat pure, unadulterated, hand-coded HTML. It is not hard to learn, in fact it is often easier and quicker than getting to grips with the foibles of a wysiwig package. I use either MS Notepad (ugh!) for quick modifications or CygnusEd on my trusty Amiga for from-scratch jobs. - Mystikan - (Steve Roper)
[OT] Re:This is OFF TOPIC for slashdot absolutely (Score:1)
Many if not most /. readers are anti-microsoft and always have been. Maybe even most of the authors and moderators are as well. But nobody ever deletes posts. They may be scored -1, but you can always read them. And maybe the reason so many pro-microsoft posts end up at -1 is they are little more than flame bait and distraction. On the rare occasions when such a post is both on-topic and well-thought-out, it is usually scored high and generates meaningful debate. As for your assertion that 'most geeks are using nt,' I would actually claim that very few geeks use nt. Most (though perhaps not all) people willing to work with such a piece of shit cannot honestly call themselves geeks. If you want to use it, fine. If you think slashdot is biased, you're probably right. Since this offends you, I recommend you go instead to any one of the thousands of microsoft propaganda sites on the net and quietly bypass this "SUCK" site.
Re:Another non-answer. (Score:1)
You want it to "clean messes" that are made by "imperfect WYSIWYG toys"? From the sounds of it, you're claiming that your "toy" is perfect.
As for using a good editor, try GXedit. If you've never used it before, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Because it's a GTK+/GNOME application, you can dynamically remap menu options to keys -- and it includes commonly used HTML tags. So, if you want the center tag to be mapped to "Alt-C", you can do that by moving over the menu option and pressing "Alt-C". It also supports syntax coloring, and a billion other options. It's not a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but it's still worth checking out.
You can find it here: [fastethernet.net]
http://devplanet.fastethernet.net/gxedit.html.
Re:The Best! (Score:1)
XEmacs best all-round tool (Score:1)
For this reason, I do recommend learning HTML, and a little Perl as well, as a bare minimum.
XEmacs is a great tool for this purpose; it has color coding of HTML and Perl, and useful context-sensitive menus.
And, yes, I have worked for a web development company for years (although I mostly sysadmin these days). And I've tried many "WYSIWYG" tools, and found them all lacking. I had to spend as much time cleaning up their output as I ever could have hoped to save from not typing the tags.
I'm a bit disappointed in the "bash the geeks" nature of this thread, especially on a site that purports to be "News for Nerds." Opposing the use of "WYSIWYG" editors, and recommending that the questioner get his hands dirty and just learn the stuff is not only a legitimate answer, it is in his best interest in the long run.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here [kernel.org]!
Re:I agree (Score:1)
I tend to do everything in XEmacs myself, but that's mostly for dynamic websites where most of the content is generated and for relatively simple pages. I tried dreamweaver this week on a page with lots (25+) of layers that responded to user clicks (hiding, showing, not much moving) and was *very* impressed. Using XEmacs on such a page was downright confusing, particularly because I wasn't the original author.
I don't necessarily think Dreamweaver is appropriate for everything. But it has its place. That place depends on the person -- someone more graphically inclined that I might be able to do a lot more with DW and less with XEmacs. Whatever.
The Best Authoring Tool Ever! (Score:2)
Cyberstudio 4 (Score:1)
Re:The Best! (Score:1)
If they don't belong, why are they defined?
What doesn't belong IMHO is draconian layout, enforced by a bunch of clear GIFs and other such kludges that are NOT defined in HTML. Layout does belong, it's PRESENTATION that is up to the user.
My favorite rule of thumb is that if frames and tables are too complex to lay out in HTML using a text editor, it's too complex anyway. Image maps are a different story, and should be generated by helper apps, and pasted into the document.
Re:What a non-answer (Score:1)
In general, when I have been handed web pages generated by a so called WYSIWYG editor, they have needed EXTENSIVE repairs with vi just to make them actually work on any browser other than the one the pages were previewed on. Forms? forget it, just re-write that part. In general after such a hack and slash repair, the pages looked substantially the same, and required less than half the time to download, plus, they actually worked!
To be fair, I haven't seen HOMESITE, does it produce correct forms? Can it not use clear GIFs?
Remember, there is no such thing as WYSIWYG on WWW (Score:4)
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.
Have you tried Hot Dog Pro, By Sausage Software? (Score:2)
Check it out at Sausage Software [sausage.com].
Style vs. Content (Score:1)
On the text editors and content side, the style should be discrete and modest, in order not to draw attention from the content of the site.
On the wysiwyg and style side, the idea is that style should be so dominating, that the visitors never notice the lack of content.
This explains why the wysiwyg people think the text editor peoples home pages suck. They don't see the heavy stylistic elements designed to draw the attention, which is what they consider the goal of html. It works the other way too. The text editor people can't find the content on the wysiwyg peoples home pages, so they blame it on bad style.
Of course, on a good web page the style emphasises the content. Creating that kind of stuff requires different skills (which you can learn), but are not the least bit geeky. Geeks either threat the style as its own goal, or prefer to ignore it and focus on the content instead.
For a geek the advice must be: If you have any real content, use a text editor, and use html as a content markup language. If you want flash, learn html and related technologies, use a text editor, and implement the flash yourself.
m4 & HTML (Score:1)
This is a little off-topic as the original question was about GUI designer packages (not whether whether vi was better, chaps!). However, if you want to generate large amounts of HTML pages quickly from standard templates and have the facility to regenerate it after tweaking the template, other posters are right in recommending automation. (Personally, I hate any package that requires me to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard more than once per minute. :-)
I've used the m4 macro techniques outlined in the following references and find them excellent for standardising pages and removing the worst pains of handcoded HTML. Every day, I find new ways to extend them. The downsides are coping with m4's syntax requirements (mind your quotes!) and the initial work creating your macros. If this doesn't suit, try some of the many other HTML preprocessing utils (see Freshmeat).
As an aside, some of the nicest pages I've seen used extremely effective graphics way beyond what I could draw - but were a pain to load and use. I've seen simpler sites that did nifty things with TABLE layouts instead.
Ade_
/
Text editors... (Score:1)
Check out NoteTab Light if you're going to be
doing work in Windows. It has a lot of nifty stuff in it, including HTML tag auto-replace. That is, you type an opening tag and it automatically adds the closing tag, and so on. You can define your own libraries of functions to do with it too, or change the ones it has if you don't like it.
Re:i know i'm going to get my butt kicked (Score:1)
Well, can't say that I agree with your coding statement. Writing HTML isn't the same as programming, but on some level, I do think it is coding. In writing a web page you're coding the page for display in a browser. Whether you call it a mark up, or text formating language, I do think it is coding (at least if you're doing it "by hand").
And as for LaTeX...I agree fully. I think HTML is (and will continue to be) a real mess. It certainly seems to me that LaTeX could've easily been extended for handling web documents, and then we wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about making sure the page comes out right in every frigging browser in existence...the type setting engine would make sure that things came out right.
Re:Mac Users (cutting edge designers) use GoLive (Score:1)
On unix, we already have something better than BBedit, it's called XEmacs. Believe me, if you like BBedit, you'll probably like XEmacs even better (I'm not dissing BBedit, it's a good tool, XEmacs just does pretty much everything BBedit does and more). As for GoLive, I can't comment, I've never used it.
I seriously doubt that we'll ever see a port of BBedit to unix due to the existence of XEmacs. A port to windows would be useful to a lot of people though.
I do have to laugh at your implication that all "cutting edge designers" use macs. That kind of statement is simply ignorant...or delusional.
Zope works very well (Score:1)
It's very hard to explain, but very easy to understand once you see it. Install a copy and see -- the distro installs quickly and painlessly, and works (by default) without intruding on your normal web server (if you have one). And yes, it works perfectly well on systems without connectivity (that's how I first evaluated it).
And best of all, you can access it from ANYWHERE, using any web browser which supports frames, forms, and passwords.
It doesn't let you drag and drop pictures: to add a picture, you click "picture", "add", "browse", and then choose it from your drive. I think that's close enough.
The only thing it doesn't have is WYSIWYG, but try it and you'll likely agree that such would only get in the way, especially since one sometimes wants to write a little bit of DTML (Zope code). It's just too useful.
-Billy
who cares! (Score:1)
The discussion was a cross platform wysiwyg editor for html pages. These are the days i wish i was mega moderator here and marked all vi/emacs/notepad messages as -10 they are all of topic. And messages like "vi nuff sayed" are just as bad as the happily long gone i'm the first poster message....
Met Vriendelijke groet/Yours Sincerly
Stijn Jonker
vi. (Score:1)
Enough Said.
The *best* tools... (Score:1)
XEmacs [xemacs.org].
Accept no substitute.
(Oh yeah, I am an HTML fascist. So what? you can make übercool pages with XEmacs too.)
Re:Since you OBVIOUSLY want a Pro Tool... (Score:1)
I have been doing web stuff since 1996 or so, so these things aren't too unfamiliar...
I have just found that using raw text editors is NOT bad, NOT hard and NOT even a bad idea. Ever heard of template files? That's what the WYSIWYG programs basically use. With just a nice ^X^I, I drop the HTML template in, write the body, and there's my kewl page. With CSS, I can do the hard visual stuff much easier, and apply it to many pages very easily. Just as easy as opening stuff into the WYSIWYG program and clicking away, even easier in some cases.
And I certainly don't want to write CGI scripts in WYSIWYG drool-proof program - I use a real text editor.
Just to let the people know that XEmacs is the best one if you need to write for Web, no matter if the language is HTML, Perl or Java.
What's wrong with the Professionals? Are they afraid to admit that they won't even want to learn and obey simple languages like HTML and CSS? C'mon, writing standards-compliant HTML is not any harder than writing non-standards-compliant HTML! Why the people get shudders when we say "Standard compliance"? It isn't about inhaling the voluminous W3C HTML standard specifications and then trying to understand the basics, it's about using your brain and doing intelligent site designing, not just stuff that looks kewl on one place but crashes everywhere else.
Re:Why text editors an ultimate design tool (Score:1)
Okay, take a look at my front page. Believe it or not, no k00l WYSIWYG stuff was used to create it. Just GNU Emacs (originally) and XEmacs.
BTW, your comment was, as it is said in foreign language, argumentum ad hominem. Lesson learned: Listen to what he's saying, don't look what he has done.
Well... (Score:1)
This said, GUI editors are a tool, not a crutch. Do your basic layout in them and get the content put in the pages, but when you're done with that don't forget to go back over them with a text editor. GUI editors are getting to the point where they can write very good code, but they aren't perfect (then again, the same can be said of any compiler; that's why people still use assembly to try and squeeze every last optimization out of their stuff).
For a text editor I'd recommend BBEdit by Bare Bones Software, but once again I think that might be Mac-only. Nonetheless, it's a very good tool for this sort of thing, and comes with many features specifically developed for working with HTML.
Emacs (Score:1)
Re:The Best! (Score:1)
HTML shouldn't be used for formatting a web page.
If you want your page to look any better than just a plain grey text page, you need to make your site into one great big GIF. Need a link? imagemap. Simple enough?
The W3 organisation have a free editor - Amaya (Score:1)
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
No MAC port, but it's C and the source is there.
HotDog (Score:1)
I'm a big fan of Sausage Software's HotDog. It is a code editor, which makes a lot of sense if you are one who likes to have full control over the page's code, but unlike a plain text editor, it adds a lot of very useful tools.
If I'm in a rush, and just need a quick WYSIWYG editor that generates very clean code, then I use Symantec's Visual Page. Most of the other visual editors I've seen generate very dirty code which, even though it may look okay in the browser, is a pain to edit manually later on.
Later.
Whats, uh, the deal (Score:1)
People please. Tables are completely fine in HTML. They are crucial, in fact, to forming your page in an effective manner.
As far as layout not being a design consideration... what are you talking about? You think that HTML authors should just plop text on the screen and let the user format it? I think not.
If you dont like HTML, try this: www.gabocorp.com
PS: VIM rules!
HTML (Score:2)
I recall a debate about a year ago on
I extract data from TeX documents all the time. And my interpreter never has any problems. Sure, a TeX document can be invalid, but so can HTML (and w/Javascript it can be downright hostile). PostScript is (I'm pretty sure) Turing complete too, and we never have any problems using that for all our documents at some point in their existence
I don't necessarily say that the file format transferred should even be LaTeX, I just said it should be TeX-based, so we could write pages the same civilized way we write everything else.
It's possible a somewhat more general TeX like language could be useful, since TeX is really for document processing rather than general publishing, but there's no reason to choose a standard that relies on humans writing such unreadable gobbledygook as HTML.
i know i'm going to get my butt kicked (Score:3)
I'm kinda peeved at all y'all who keep referring to writing HTML "code".
WHAT !?!?
C/C++ is code. Smalltalk is code. LISP is code. ML is code.
PERL is code. Tck/Tk is code. Python is code.
hell, even Java is (probably
....
HTML is a @#$%^& text formatting language, for God's sake!. I'll even concede that writing CGI/Perl web stuff is code. But I'm pretty sure you do that in emacs or vi, not Dreamweaver or whatever. No, Javascript doesn't count.
I had to write some HTML once. It sucked. It's a pain. It's terrible. What lunatic decided that HTML was an appropriate language with which to invent the Web? (rhetorical question, i know the history behind the http).
Hell, i'm using annoying HTML formatting in this post.
Referring to HTML as code puts you in the same catagory IMHO as Al Gore's "Open Source" website.
Speaking as a coder, I use LaTeX for all my text formatting needs. Wouldn't the web be much better if it was all LaTeX based?
Who's with me? Who wants to bring the glorious coders' revolution? We have nothing to lose but our chains!
Re:The Best! (Score:1)
I'm sure the GPL would allow MS to include Emacs as long as they put the source to emacs on the CD too and didn't use any Emacs source in their applications. At least then they'd be a decent Editor for the Win32 platform. If they thought emacs was too difficult for their customers then they could port an open source editor similar but much more functional than notepad to Windows (e.g. NEdit). Again as long as they release the source with the CD and don't use the code in their other applications I can't see this causing any problems.
If an open source alternative to a free (as in included with Windows) application in Windows exists then why not make the most of it. It would benefit the Windows customers and it would generate a bit of good publicity for them as long as they stuck to the GPL. Of course, this is all too much to expect from them, but it would be good anyway.
That's if I used Windows, but as I don't either way I don't mind.
--
Re:pico/vi/emacs sucks. (Score:1)
Well I wouldn't use a product with a history of screwing up code becasue it shows that it comes from a company that either:
doesn't care about standards, or
doesn't test their products throughly
I think MS falls into both of the above.
I've downloaded and installed Dreamweaver in VMware (haven't tried WINE yet - does it work?) and it works a treat. Certainly better than versions of front page that I've seen, however I've not seen FP2000, however I wouldn't buy from a company with a history of shoddy problems anyway.
--
Re:Netscape Composer (Score:1)
I used to use it a while back - not for designing web pages but for basic word processing. This was back in the days when Linux had no decent office apps and at least by saving the work in HTML meant I could take it and print ito out on any machine with a web browser on any platform.
But the reason it's not mentioned is it's not a serious alternative to the professional web design tools it would be great if someone made the new composer in mozilla an excellent cross platform open source design tool but I guess it probably won't be - it'll just be like the old one.
BTW if anyone from Netscape is reading - although the HTML generated in composer is OK it's not 100% valid. Run some code generated with composer through http://validator.w3.org/ and fix the bugs. Most are simple bugs such as not putting quotes around numbers in certain tags such as FONT SIZE=+1 instead of FONT SIZE="+1" - according toi the validator they should be there.
--
Re:The absolute #1 HTML editors (Score:1)
Windows- notepad
AS emacs is available for Windows why would you want to use notepad? It's the worlds most basic and useless text editor. No line numbering, or remembering your indentation, no support for anything other than cut, copy and paste! Well in one of my earlier submissions I think MS should include one of the better GPLed editors with Windows - as long as they include the editors source and don't use the source in their own programs there's nothing to stop them.
Just look at the excellent editors availble out of the box on a standard Linux system then look at Windows - notepad!
Then again in Linux we don't have any WYSIWYG(IYUTIB) (if you use the included browser - as HTML can look different in different browsers of with different users settings) editors for web design (except of course Netscape Composer and a few of the office apps). So we have to brag about the text editors don't we
But expect Linux versions of the popular web suthoring tools shortly, or if not we'll use WINE or VMware.
--
Re:Well... (Score:1)
--
Re:The best... (Score:1)
It says:
Slashdot
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters
It's obvious that this stuff does matter to the person posting the question.
Yes I do know that Slashdot is mostly Linux users (I'm one myself - 100% winfree since 1996) but there's no notice when you enter the site saying - Windows users not welcome, we will not help you or take your views seriously. So if someone asks a question and we can offer help we should do so without engaging into a mighty piss take of Windows and loads of emacs r00lz and whatever. You can post this if you want but at least provide some justification for what you say.
--
Dreamweaver for Linux (what do people think)? (Score:2)
If you'd like to try in out in WINE or VMware or you have Windows installed or own a mac.
Personally I'd like to see some shockwave DEVELOPMENT tools for Linux (not that I'd use shockwave on the wwweb but on an Intranet that's a different matter).
I'm not sure on Macromedias attitude on Linux. They do have a (shockwave) flash plugin for Linux and Solaris versions of Netscape which works quite well but it's still at beta 1 and it's been like that for ages. Have Macromedia just quickly released support for these platforms to keep the UNIX community quiet and to say that flash is a truely multi platform format, and then not plan to develop the plugin any further.
Granted, this plugin is still fairly stable for a beta, but it is not a full shockwave plugin as it doesn't support director, just flash. Also if Macromedia don't plan to develop this plugin any further newver versions of flash may not work with it in the future. Does anyone know if Macromedia are still supporting Linux/UNIX or were they not really serious in the first place.
BTW you can download the flash plugin from:
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/
Dreamweaver 2 + Fireworks beats them all (Score:5)
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.
GoLive 4 vs. Dreamweaver (Score:2)
Re:Frontier rocks (Score:2)
The feature list is impressive: supports WebDAV, interprocess communication with XML-RPC, support TCP/IP access for distributed computing as well as TCP/IP server and client capability, can serve http content from the object DB (static or dynamic) or the local filesystem, handles XML better than Java does, and has a great deal of groupware functionality plugged in. It even plays nice with Dreamweaver, and it runs under Linux with WINE.
The kernel of Frontier isn't open source, which is a pity. Most of the functionality, however, is available and fixes and improvements are available.
Frontier has a very powerful and clean language called Usertalk. Meatt Neuburg ons wrote an excellent book available from O'Rielly.
It's cool, check it out [userland.com]
Webmonkey Review of Web Authoring Software (Score:2)
http://www.webmonkey.com/99/19/index1a. html [webmonkey.com]
Homesite is definately the best yet (Score:4)
Homesite/TopStyle/Dreamweaver (Score:2)
They all are easy to use, cant get much easier than what they are and they perform well.
Dreamweaver: I love Templates Library and All the Suite management features also The pretty good code it generates for WYSIWYG, other things it has is SSI emulator which you have to love and good style sheet support.DHTML kicks in this program having tons of pre made behaviours that work extremely well and are very flexible, and also work in IE and NS.. finally!
Homesite: This program rules for editing your code, so its just right it has a design view but that will kill all formating, stick to Dreamweaver for visual stuff. Its integration of the code sweeper, preview mode style sheet support site management features as well as some fancy things here and there, I love the color coading especially usefull for people who also use JS PHP Perl and other laguages mixed in there it does all osrts of of cool things and the validator islightning fast, you also have to love search and replace feature.
TopStyle: Not out yet im using an alpha, im a tester, its only for win32 and all it does is style sheets and site management but it does what it does exellently fats easy keeps formating, its made by the same guy that made Homesite so you will notice resemblance to it, I think the program is so big its kind of over kill for editing style sheets but it will save you tons of time and keep everything by the standards if you use CSS, its a good tool tht is not totally needed but helps a lot.
These are my 3 favoutite tools I use all 3. but you only need this much power if you are going for proffessional stuff a BIG BIG job. The best tool though is knowing HTML4 and CSS1 and 2 so you can polish everything. You needto know this stuff and you HAVE to stick to the standards.
Re:The Best! (Score:2)
I do those all the time for client sites, with nothing more advanced than pico. Really, a nested table is no different from anything else, if you pay attention to what you're doing. HTML is a simple standard, and if you follow it, even horribly complex pages like Slashdot are pretty easy to make. They may take a long time to type in, but the markup for it is really simple - you make a sketch of what you want, draw circles around the 'bits' to figure out their arrangement, and start typing. You'd be amazed how simple all of that stuff really is when you pick it apart before you write it down.
Re:The Best! (Score:2)
Blink...
Damn, you're on the wrong site for someone who believes that... try doing a 'view source' on this page - I guarantee you'll see at least four table tags, possibly more, all used to format the text on the page into an easier to read layout.
Unfortunately, the idea that the user should be the one who decides on page layout is not one that goes into the planning of world wide web pages, any more than it goes into the planning of News Papers, Term Papers, Pamphlets, or any other media where information is presented to an audience. Layout and presentation affects how information is recieved, be it well or poorly, and knowing how to do proper layout can be the deciding factor between a web site being successful, and being ridiculed. Admittedly, knowing enough to not over-do the layout is a major factor, but even dumping a big pile of words on someone with no line breaks, paragraph separations, colours, collumns, or menus is still a decision about layout made by the site designer - and usually it's a bad one, since the site then becomes nigh-impossible to read.
Amaya (Score:2)
I use the WWW Consortium's own editor, Amaya [w3.org]. Amaya is buggy, it crashes every once in a while. Amaya does keep its work saved in temporary files, so you can usually pick up right where you left off.
Amaya's bugs are more than made up by the fact that it generates very clean and portable HTML. That's what I consider more important than anything else.
Re:If not regular text ed. then... (Score:4)
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.
Hotmetal pro 5 (Score:3)
Dreamweaver and Homesite and economics... (Score:4)
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 (Score:4)
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:
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
Re:This is OFF TOPIC for slashdot (Score:2)
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Yes! Homesite! The next best thing to emacs.. (Score:4)
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=-
Re:Netscape Composer (Score:2)
---
Re:Why do people still use text editors for HTML? (Score:2)
I for one know that the most important thing is control. That's why I chose Linux. That's why I edit my HTML by hand. And I don't think it's up to you to dictate what web design should be.
Frontier rocks (Score:3)
It has an intergrated database that isnt very hard to learn how to use. On the macintosh, where it was born, you can edit files directly out of its database in things like Dreamweaver or BBedit. This feature is coming to windows. You can also set it up as a server and have people submit content via file sharing, email, or ftp. There is even an extension someone has written that lets you edit files in the database from a web browser.
The closest thing to this type of environment that i've seen running on linux is Zope, but Frontier is, in my opinion, easier to learn and use. Also it doesnt rely on a web interface, which can be slow at times.
Anyways you can still download a free version of 5.0.1 from their site at www.userland.com [userland.com]. I'm not sure of the exact URL for the free download, but you can email me and I'll find it if you cant.
They are at version 6.0 right now, and the newer versions are no longer free. But 5.0.1 is still very powerfull, and FREE. I like free, so much i bought a licensed copy. Wait, that doesnt make sense. Anyways, Frontier rocks, Frontier is the best, all bow down to the power of Frontier!
Adobe GoLive 4 (Score:3)
It will also tell you which features work on which mainstream web browsers and their versions. So if you want to introduce a snazzy efect it'll let you know what you should and shouldn't use.
In addition to its WYSIWYG editor it a has a full featured code editor that does auto-indentation and colors various parts of code like emacs.
It supports full drag and drop from the Mac Finder (or from Windows' Explorer). This is what I use professionally.
-Brandon Lewis
-----------------------------------
Linux is free if your time is worth nothing.
Are you a bot? (Score:2)
Dont edit HTML at all. Program the pages. (Score:2)
The best one I have used is Dreamveawer 2, but I use it mainly for layout and design.
When it comes to big sites (>100 pages) pure HTML is a bad way to create sites. There is no encapsualtion of code or re-use at all.
What I find myself doing now more and more often is writing objects and functions in serverside JavaScript that renders my HTML. (I REALLY like JavaScript. Such a clean language.)
Something like:
var title = "This is the title"
var body = "Beginning"
body += "Next item"
body += "Third Item etc."
page(title, content)
can render a LOT of HTML and is very simple to use and maintain. Especially those last minute changes of large protions of a site. Content and design is completely seperated
It's funny but it is kind of like every programmer forgets what he knows about good code design when doing HTML.
I found that when I did large sites they would always run late. Simply because there would be more ways for the pages in the site not to match. And then when something didn't macth it would take longer to correct because the sites where bigger.
Max M's 1. rule of webdesign: The time used to solve problems gets squared with size of the site.
This can be solved by looking at a website as a programming task, and then throw good software engineering practices at the problem.
Use a pre-processor! (Score:2)
Oh, and a regular text-editor of course.. like vim [vim.org] or emacs or heck, edlin, whatever makes you feel warm and fuzzy..
There is no easy way to make webpages that rock, except copy/paste. (Which incedentally is what htmlpp is good at :-)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Just to keep this on topic, I use a text editor and HTML Tidy. HTML Tidy is a great little program that checks and corrects your code and will do indenting if you want (and its cross platform). You can get it at http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy [w3.org].
Skippy
Windows design Re:Dreamweaver (Score:3)
Not to say I wouldn't love to be designing natively in Linux or Mac (each for different reasons, preferably Linux because of stability), it's just not the reality I can work with now.
Dreamweaver (Score:4)
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... it's it and that's that. (Score:2)
One reason it is so good is that it is true WYSIWYG. I have rarely seen any browser show a page any differently than it is shown in the workspace. Als, you can customize Dreamweaver. All your object bars can be changed to add actions you use regularly. DW will also write standard simple java scripts for things like rollovers and whatnot. Fireworks (The Macromedia vector graphics tool) will also export rollovers and regular images to DW.
I would also recommend looking into Allair's Net Objects Fusion. You get a very comparable (though not as feature rich) HTML editor and you get the ability to program cold fusion apps which is a sweet deal. If you don't need CF capabilities, check out Home Site which is allaire's editor stand alone. Considerably cheaper than both the products you were asking about.
You can d/l demos of dreamweaver, Net Objects Fusion , and Home Site from each company's homesite which I have listed below. You can also check out Fireworks.
If you already use Illustrator for vector graphics. Let me sing you the web praises of Fireworks. It has the best image export utility out there, handles vector graphics as well as Illustrator, and you can get a Dreamweaver/Fireworks package for a sweet price. Not to mention, FW is very geared to WEB graphics whereas Illustrator runs the gammut and is somewhat lacking in creating web graphics with exporting images. Fireworks can strip images down to such a small size it is incredible.
Also, while Amaya has allot of potential, it is still pretty spartan compared to what DW and Fusion are capable of. I have played with fusion a bit and it is certainly powerful, however most of what it can do, DW does as well. Plus, I like the interface of DW better than any of them, very intuative and user friendly.
Hope that helped.
Macromedia [macromedia.com]
Allaire [allaire.com]
Re:The Best! (Score:2)
(or in my case, UltraEdit) is the best thing
going if you want complete compatibility...
I create a two large websites (for a newspaper
and a student organization at a university)
using nothing but UltraEdit, a text editor that
does nothing more then colour certain text
depending on their function (HREF's, etc. are
green, things between quotes are black, etc.)
I've never found a useful WYSIWYG editor out
there, but when I need something more, I just
simply get the barest product to do the job, and
type in the code that's needed for HTML (ie:
I get myself a simple freeware image map program,
make the image with Photoshop and then type in
the code...
Sure, if you want a crap website that doesn't
work 100% between IE and Netscape, and reads as
if it were an evil little devil, then go with
the new Microsoft website program... I'm not a 'hacker' (and especially not a *nix hacker), but I prefer using a text editor, anyday.
Dreamweaver 2 -- because.... (Score:5)
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:
There are a couple of negative points with the software however.
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!
Re:The Best! (Score:2)
Just because everyone abuses it dosen't make it right. There are now alternatives (CSS) that should be used instead of screwing up the HTML layout.
Adobe/Golive Cyberstudio (Score:2)
For example, Cyberstudio has a web-to-database interface that is unmatched, a great "Actions" interface that allows you to link DHTML and CSS actions, scenes, etc.
But the best feature is the group site-management features. For example, it allows you to move files around at will, renaming, reorganizing, directly over the network, while other people are accessing the site.
And just for the record, quite a few of the major design agencies have the same opinion...
Wimps? Try making a REAL website buddy! (Score:4)
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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open source everything
Text Editors (Score:3)
Most feechurs, but easy to use? (Score:2)
This strikes me as a rather vague spec for a tool.
How about deciding on the feature set you need, and look for a tool that satisfies most of it?
Re:The BEST argument for using WYSIWYG tools (Score:2)