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Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2008 6:24 am
by Kadanis
Hey guys,

I'm looking for a relative simple WYSIWYG HTML editor for some of our staff that need to produce HTML but don't know a great deal about the language. Preferably free or cheap, and one that doesn't add crap code all over the place.

Any ideas? Just thought I'd ask here, I am googling away too, but wanted to try and avoid downloading and testing loads of apps.

Cheers

Re: Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:04 pm
by dphickey
I'm new here but I think you are looking for Nvu. It's open source, has WYSIWYG.

Re: Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2008 9:58 pm
by Ambush Commander

Re: Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2008 10:56 pm
by alex.barylski
Do you need an editor which is web based or a desktop application? That distinction will make a big difference.

Web based editors all suffer from the same problems. Editors like TinyMCE work extremely hard doing back flips trying to bed the editor into acting as expected with limited success. While the hacks might work, they also make the code more complex and complex code always results in more bugs, so it's a lose-lose really.

The best bet for web based would probaly be XStandard: http://xstandard.com/

However it's not a javascript based editor and requires a download (activeX control I think).

As for web based WYSIWY editors that rely solely on JS...your best bet is to just use an editor under Firefox or opera as those browsers I believe have much better standard support and are less liekly going to throw in extra crap HTML code.

Desktop editors...have much more control over the WYSIWYG API (when compared to JS) so most should produce fairly decent code.

I'm not sure of a single WYSIWYG editor that doesn't *muck* up your code a little from it's original source.

If anything a good editor will study your format style and then when rebuilding the HTML for saving generate the HTML according to your style.

Re: Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2008 2:56 am
by Kadanis
Hey,

Thanks for the responses, guess I should have mentioned that desktop based is really what we're looking for. We've tried NVU but it seems to be pretty good with adding lots of junk, unless there is settings I've missed.

I guess the search continues, maybe some xHTML training is in order lol. At least when my dev schedule allows for it ;)

Re: Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2008 8:54 pm
by alex.barylski
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

http://www.evrsoft.com/

Are two more options -- Amaya is a browser but it comes with a built in WYSIWYG editor and is your best bet in writing standards compliant code as it's a project of the W3C.

Personally I would suggest learning to write it by hand as no machine will ever write it as good as a skilled human :)

Re: Suggestions for a good (preferably free) basic HTML Editor

Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 2:27 am
by Kadanis
Too true. Hand coding definitely produces the cleanest code in any language. But some of these guys are not coders at all, you know sales and marketing types that need to produce simple HTML for newsletters to clients etc and I don't want them taking up dev team members time with it.

Thanks again for the suggestions, I'll try em out and see what's a good fit.

Cheers
:)