Web page builder for Phoenix users

[priior]

denro:
it almost sounds like you work for trellian Most of us who use phoenix, and design web pages whether part time or full time... have one thing in common: we like standards, w3c standards. We like webpages that support standards (why else would we use phoenix?). This has nothing to do with "real designers use notepad"; This has to do with "it's about time web designers start supporting standards and end the stupid browser wars."

Just like Stefan, me too i havent seen any wysiwyg editor that produces html (im not even going into xhtml) that uses modern concepts of design (separating content from style, using tags that make structural sense)

Moreover, web designers who produce crappy html because they are too lazy to learn something extremely simple (markup) are in a way going against the huge effort the rest of us are putting in to clean up the web.

If this isnt the case, and ur wysiwyg editor is able to automagically design a markup, figure out what "class"es to use, optimize the css... then my apologies for this tiny rant.

[lar3ry]

I've been writing SGML/HyTime/HTML/XML for over ten years. I constantly check the HTML I write/generate with the W3C validator, and I have yet to find any WYSIWYG editor that can write better HTML/XHTML than a simple text editor. (HotMetal, its precursor Author/Editor, and asWedit come to mind in being better than average, by the way.)

Be that as it may, my daughter has recently asked me to help her write her a "home page." What do I tell her? Learn HTML??? The kid has homework and after-school activities... I seriously doubt she's going to want to learn the mark-up codes.

One thing I could say is "Show me what you want" using Word or whatever it is she uses for homework assignments. I'll take her work, and mark it up into XHTML and CSS. That, however, seems to make more work for the both of us.

So... my own solution is to find one of those "WYSIWYG" editors that automatically insert the <P> and <Hx> tags, and let her write her own web pages. Then, I just need to run it through HTML Tidy and the W3C validator, perform any necessary tweaks, and voila.

The problem, of course, it finding such an editor. I don't believe that SQ makes HotMetal any more, and asWedit seems to be another product without a home (it doesn't run on my Linux box due to the fact that the libraries aren't compatible with the latest RedHat). I don't really want to spend too much money on something that may just be a one-shot for her. So, this topic is interesting to me. I don't personally need a WYSIWYG editor, but having one to let me daughter create her own HTML pages would be profoundly useful.

[denro]

In response to Priior who thought I might work for Trellian, No I don't. Like another poster, I've used a number of web page editors including Hot Metal, AceHTML, AOLPress, Netscape Composer, Front Page Express, and Front Page, etc. None of which I particularly liked. I am not primarily a web page designer, I do very little in fact, but need to do some. I teach programming (primarily C++) at a local college. Had Trellian been a commercial product ($$) I probably would not have recommended it in this forum. But for those who like to have a graphical environment, to pay for Front Page when you are browsing with Phoenix seems somewhat a contradiction. From what I can see, the HTML code is good and may automatically run through tidy.exe, at least that module is part of the program. It does not appear to use tables for placement, but rather offsets. In many other editors, to set an image at a particular location you are left with creating a 0 width border table and placing the image in one of the cells. Trellian lets you right click on the image, select "Float Image" and then drag the image to the desired location. Looking at the HTML code produced, you see offsets. Images can overlap in whatever way you desire. Again, I am not affiliated with Trellian and never heard of them before a few days ago. But the code produced looks respectable.

[ssstraub]

The problem with paying for Frontpage is not that you're paying for it, but that you'd be paying for the crappiest "pay to use" HTML editor availible! *AND* it leans heavily on IE's non-standard coding practices. If you use anything that costs money, at least use Macromedia's Dreamweaver. You can WYSIWYG o*OR* code. Or both at the same time in a split-pane window. I don't see how it can get better than that.

[Stefan]

From what I can see, the HTML code is good and may automatically run through tidy.exe, at least that module is part of the program. It does not appear to use tables for placement, but rather offsets. In many other editors, to set an image at a particular location you are left with creating a 0 width border table and placing the image in one of the cells. Trellian lets you right click on the image, select "Float Image" and then drag the image to the desired location. Looking at the HTML code produced, you see offsets. Images can overlap in whatever way you desire.

Hum, it does sound like it is at least above average.
Will take a peak at it when I get time.

Though I wonder why the developers didn't use their own software to create their own homepage, becuse it really doesn't convince you that they know how to make a good webpage editor

[aspr1n]

Just thought I'd drop in a link to the feature request I'd made in a similar vein:

http://www.mozillazine.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=880

asp

[priior]

Denro:
Since you were so civil in your response, i went and tried it (trellian)

I was surprised that the generated markup was technically valid html 4.01. For people like lar3ry's daughter.. it might be perfect actually.

for a web designer or hobbyist tho, i don't think it's worth it. The time it would take to make the page then clean up the clutter in the markup, centralize the css's, fix the structure, remove the extra <p></p>'s for spacing.. it doesn't justify not learning the makrup and doing it manually.

beats frontpage tho

[Stefan]

Downloaded it to check it out, and while I sofare havn't made a webpage with it there are some things that I noticed imediately.

* This is in no way a free program. It's only the beta that is free, but they definitly intend to charge for it in the future.

* The spell checking kind of sucked. It gave errors for things like "a" and "it's". One would think that would be fairly common words in the english language.

* It uses the current IE browser installed as the preview page renderer...
Since that can be anything from IE 4.01 to 6.1 and I also couldn't find any way to change preview browser, I'm a bit worried about how standards compliant code it will generate.
It might even break in IE 6 as well as Opera 7, Gecko etc.

* Starting a new page and looking at the code made me seriously worried
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">


Though I never use it, the WYSIWYG editor that comes with mozilla at least adds a proper 4.01 transitional doctype as well as <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">.
Add to it that Mozilla composer is also REALLY for FREE as well as uses the best HTML engine available for previewing and this unsientific 5 minute review/comparrison has a clear winner, and it's not Trellian.

[old Neil Parks]

Though I never use it, the WYSIWYG editor that comes with mozilla at least adds a proper 4.01 transitional doctype as well as <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">.

Add to it that Mozilla composer is also REALLY for FREE as well as uses the best HTML engine available for previewing and this unsientific 5 minute review/comparrison has a clear winner, and it's not Trellian.

If only Composer could be made available as a standalone product, I'm sure it would become very popular--perhaps as popular as Phoenix is as a standalone browser.

[flatrabbit]

i concur, i think that composer would be very popular if it were released as a standalone product. Although i would have a hard time switching from textpad. I tried one of the big WYSIWYG editors <cough>dreamweaver<cough> and i wasnt really impressed and i won't go near frontpage. I think i'll stick to textpad, but im gonna try out a few of the others mentioned in this thread just in case.

[shimage]

I am aware, and often joke about it, there is an attitude among many designers something like "real programmers use notepad to write web pages." I suppose we could extend that and say that they also don't use a modern graphical word processor but use DOS WordPerfect;

why ever would programmers use a wordprocessor? i would think they'd have the good sense to type set their documents. i would be especially surprised by web designers who used word processors. i mean, if you're already used to type setting your documents, why would you ever bother with a word processor? or maybe i'm just confused...

[jhimmel]

i concur, i think that composer would be very popular if it were released as a standalone product.

I'd like to see this as well.

Jim

[xfranky]

Actually I'm using Html-Kit. Its WYSIWYG editor is still at (very) beta stage, and I'm not gonna use it anyway. It's completely free, with the latest version of tidy rendering a near-perfect XHTML plus validator (my website is in XHTML1.0 strict, thanks to w3c & Html-Kit), many (X)Html & CSS2 tags and values, autocomplete of almost anything inside a tag, and tons of plugins.
I'm not a professional web-designer, but still love "writing" XHTML with some software 'helping me doing the right things'.

[old Neil Parks]

Actually I'm using Html-Kit.

If their own page is a sample of the product's output, I'll pass. <G>

[djnr]

I've used HTML-Kit in the past, and liked it - if you spent enough time setting it up its very powerful. Has anyone used 1stpage 2000? It seems to have stalled in its development. Not sure what's up with their home page right now though- gross.

I actually use Dreamweaver at work and it generates respectable code - not sure about floating images though, but that's not really my style. Its site management abilities more than its coding are what make it a great way to maintain a larger site - but it costs $$$. It also gives you good control over the code as well though.

I think the ideal solution is: design your page in a graphics editor, and then build it using a text editor. Then you can just export the graphic elements you need, and you can design your whole page at once instead of importing images from here/there.

If you want to design wb pages, you have to learn HTML, even if you use a WYSIWIG editor. When your design doesn't work in a particlar browser, you'll need to look at the code.

I've just discovered Crimson editor, which supports macros, syntax highlighting, FTP and other goodies. Its free.

A neat little app is X-Gen by freesoft. It lets you create a template with variables and allows you to create entire uniform sites. I use it for my hobby page http://freewarehound.com. It's only a 300K download I think and very useful for certain kinds of sites. - you can find it through my site

In terms of free WYSIWIG though I'd go with Mozilla Composer. I think its one of the most mature free ones out there.