Creating a website has become a lot easier these days, thanks to the more powerful and versatile HTML editors. To those who are using Linux and are seriously considering a career in web development, you can try some of the best Free and Open-source HTML editors that I have here on my list:Quanta Plus
Quanta Plus, originally called Quanta, is a web Integrated development environment (IDE) for HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP and any other XML-based languages or scripting languages. It is part of KDE, released in the Kdewebdev package. Quanta is capable of both WYSIWYG design and handcoding. It features tag completion as you type and tag editing through a dialog interface, script language variable auto-completion, project management, live preview, PHP debugger, CVS support, Subversion support (through external plugin) to name just a few.
Bluefish
Bluefish, as described on its project home page, is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.
TinyMCE
TinyMCE, also known as the Tiny Moxiecode Content Editor, is a platform-independent web-based JavaScript/HTML WYSIWYG editor control, released as open source software under the LGPL by Moxiecode Systems AB. It has the ability to convert HTML textarea fields or other HTML elements to editor instances. TinyMCE is designed to easily integrate with content management systems, such as Mambo, Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and e107.
Amaya
Amaya is web authoring tool with browsing abilities, created by a structured editor project at Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), a French national research institution, and later adopted by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. It was then extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG.
KompoZer
KompoZer is a WYSIWYG HTML Editor based on Nvu. It is maintained by a community-driven fork and is a project on Sourceforge. In March 2007, KompoZer was featured on Download.com's round up on the best free alternatives to Adobe CS3, where it was favorably compared to Adobe Dreamweaver.
Anybody who is "seriously" considering a career in web-based design needs to do the minimal legwork it takes to learn html/css/javascript. then either learn emacs or pick a gui text editor you like (i'd recommend geany). wysiwyg is great for adding to a textarea in a blog or content management system, where you client has no need to learn html, but you shouldn't be doing any serious design work in any wysiwyg editor (imo, of course).
ReplyDeleteI agree with the previous comment. People should learn to code well enough to use a text editor for coding. I would pick wim over emacs, but that's just me.
ReplyDeleteOf the 5 editors only 2 are WYSIWYG, Kompozer, and TinyMCE. Quanta has the capability, but is usually used in text mode.
ReplyDeleteI code my sites by hand in php, and html, but it's nice once in a while to just knock something uncomplicated out by pressing a few buttons, and have it magically appear on the screen. Of course then you have to go in and clean up the code, but it's no where's as bad as Frontpage used to be (does MS still even make that?)
I'm not sure I'd mix wysiwyg editors with text editors. They tend to serve different functions and sometimes different audiences. Also, if you don't want to deal with the vi/vim and emacs learning curves, a GUI text editor is perfectly acceptable. Since websites are most commonly constructed using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Nothing more complicated than gedit (for example) is really required.
ReplyDeleteI've tried NVU in the past and wasn't particularly impressed. That said, I'm sure it could have improved since that time. The blurb about KompoZer seems to tout it as comparable to Dreamweaver. Cynic that I am, the best I can reply is "we'll see".
I agree, James, that Gedit can indeed be a great HTML editor--especially with the Snippets plugin that allows you to insert variable amounts of pre-defined code with just a few keystrokes. This is what I'm using now for my Webpage Design class, although my teacher of course insists on Notepad.... I guess I should consider myself lucky that at least Notepad++ is installed on the school computers.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a few of you 'old school typing' guys may be actually in school or just got out. I've been doing this for a few years and I just don't hate or discount WYSIWYG in 2008 for fast output.
ReplyDeleteAdmit that web design can be some achingly boring stuff and you're close to ridding yourself of burnout. Remember: if you're inside coding, you're not out selling sites; if you're out selling, you're not writing code.
I actually have all those apps listed, except one. BlueRay beat out the superior/cheaper HD-DVD because it has a cool name. I like and use BlueFish, folks; I don't really know why, but I LOVE it.
So much of our stuff is CSS and Wiki so what difference does it make when all of the aforementioned software is FREE?
Notepad is just used by schools that have a contract w/ M$. Whatever you can use to stave off burnout, go w/ that.
"AHEM" Anybody who is "seriously" considering a career in web-based design needs to... find another job without an eroding pay scale. Kids in high school are doing some teriffic looking sites w/ just WYSIG and Wiki.
ReplyDeleteWeb developers/designers need to lay off the 'back to school and student loans' talk and use any free app they can find. Seriously, why would you want to learn JavaScript on your own dime?
GoogleDocs and Zoho.com are giving away AJAX for free. Everybody and their dog has a website. People don't want to pay us the Big Bucks anymore.
Central High juniors doing wicked, cool sites for their garage band or karate club don't have student loans to pay back. They didn't learn JavaScript, they copied and pasted JavaScript code from one of the module sites.
Aptana is a very good editor.
ReplyDeleteMy best editor is Codelobster
ReplyDelete