Luckily up until this point of my web development career, I have never used a wysiwyg or visual editor to build HTML and CSS. I literally haven't even installed one on my computer until last week.
However, I'm currently working on a fairly simple project for a client where they'd like to manage the site afterwards using such a program. No problem, I thought, the big guys like Adobe's GoLive and Macromedia's Dreamweaver tout their adoption of CSS and web standards — surely I can handcraft the templates and then let the client manage things from there, right? Not so fast. Both of these products use the antiquated Opera 6 rendering engine, which dates back to early 2002! The site I'm working on isn't exactly complicated. Flexible-width columns and a few absolutely positioned things are about as complex as it gets, but it gets horribly mangled in the "view" mode of either of these programs. Remember, I'm not looking for anything too complex here, just some simple functionality to edit pages and copy pre-existing code on the site. Neither of these behemoths even comes close to being able to do that for this site.
The other obvious choice is Nvu, a product based on the old Netscape Composer and later Mozilla Composer. It uses the Gecko rendering engine (the same thing Firefox uses) and does render the page correctly. It also works on Linux, Windows, and OSX and as a side bonus is entirely free and open source. However, it's already crashed my Windows machine twice and it doesn't offer the same functionality as its more powerful brethren. The lack of full templating tools and the half-implementation of the lockable template areas are important omissions in the current 1.0 version, as far as I can tell. But, it looks like the only tool that might even possibly work.
As I mentioned in the beginning, I'm blissfully innocent when it comes to these tools, so maybe I'm missing something. Is there another product I should be trying or are there some settings I should switch? It's hard to believe that this is the best the wysiwyg world has to offer.
Comments
Geof Harries - August 1, 2005 8:31 pm
I really don't think there's other WYS options - GoLive and Dreamweaver may be the only "viable" tools out there in the marketplace. I downloaded Nvu on the weekend but the user experience was, well, horrendous. Buttons had misleading labels, form fields were obscure, heck it didn't even know what a CSS file was. So that got removed...there's beauty in simplicity. That's why BBEdit and SkEdit are so great.
The only solution I can think of for you is Macromedia Contribute, but that doesn't maintain semantic, lean code all that well either.
All hope is lost :)
geof
deeje - August 3, 2005 1:25 pm
Actually, Macromedia Contribute uses the IE controller on Windows, and the WebKit controller (Safari) on Mac OS X. The most recent version of Contribute includes the latest CSS-P code from Dreamweaver... check it out!
Jesse - August 3, 2005 7:49 pm
Dreamweaver isn't for people to 'maintain' sites, it is supposed to be used to develop them. MX 2004 isn't the greatest developer tool though... it is a really confused application. But it is a great tool to use if you want your users to maintain sites with Contribute 3 (Dreamweaver templates offer up some interesting features for Contribute users).
Anyway, give Contribute 3 a go for your clients use... you may be surprised or not. Interested to hear your thoughts regardless.
Smithee - August 4, 2005 5:26 pm
I've been through this a few times over the years and each time the WYS apps just bring heartache. I've also heard good things about Contribute, but I like Drupal, Wordpress, and the various Nuke CMSs better for client use. The more features they have the harder they are to set up, but once set up they're easy for the client to maintain on the fly from any browser.
George Papadakis - August 5, 2005 8:10 am
I have caught myself always getting back to my all time classic VIM, even though Dreamweaver is installed and used often by my rather lazy self.
The more you get addicted by "power and simplicity" and the more difficult is to cope with monster, such as MX studio apps are.
As geeks tend to say, ysiwygIng is lame.
Terry Apodaca - August 8, 2005 5:12 pm
Hmmm...I use Dreamweaver sometimes...even just as a simple text editor (Yeah, I know...why use it then?). Some others I have come across are HTMLKit and an article on Digital Web, "Web Designers Freelance Toolbox for Windows," talks about a tool I used back in College before it went under: 1st Page 2000. Read up on the new site out for this product...looks like they are bringing it back soon. Here is their URL: http://www.evrsoft.com/
These are , of course, windows (not sure if there are OS X or Linux builds for these) apps. HTML Kit has a ton of add-ons and I really like that it can do a dual view (preview) for you. Check it out too: Html-Kit/
Mac Academy - August 9, 2005 3:32 am
I use an Apple mac, I don't have problems. WYSIWYG on Mac because of very good workflow in Apple Macintosh. Colours are always correct, fonts sizes are marked up well using css. Yes I know there will be some problems with IE, I try to avoid those IE specific styles and move ahead. Use of content management systems like Mambo and Drupal reduced the need to relay on editing tools. Most of the content mangement systems comes with nice little html editors and menu builders.
rob - August 15, 2005 12:39 pm
WYSIWYG
well coming next week is the new updated studio 8 from macromedia. It has a more robust and updated rendering engine. That might be good for development. For client to update their own use Contribute, it rocks.