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Physicist Igor Ljubuncic writes about the dearth of offline graphical web editors. These used to be quite common, but all the established names are long gone and even some of the newer ones are looking neglected. He summarizes what's still available now in 2018 and the relative strengths and weaknesses of these remaining tools.
Once upon a time, there were dozens of WYSIWYG editors, all offering their own wonders, as well as their own range of inconsistencies, garbage code and functionality. I came across the old Nvu back in 2006, upgraded to Kompozer when this one came about, and kept on using it ever since in some form or another, as it offers the simplicity of writing stuff without having to worry about code, plus some serious usability benefits that no other program seems to offer. But then, Kompozer hasn't seen any updates in a long while, and some refresh is needed. What do we have on the table?
And I'll add in a general question, what is your preferred method of dealing with either HTML or CSS or both? Strangely mine is Emacs for the HTML and vi for the CSS.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:55PM (2 children)
Funny you should ask. :)
I wrote a documentation system, wtfm [ourtimelines.com], and an underlying macro language, aa_macro [ourtimelines.com], to deal efficiently and flexibly with HTML and CSS. The graphic editors I tried uniformly produced bloated, low quality and often cross-browser incompatible pages; yet writing complex HTML and CSS directly to get things done right is hugely labor intensive.
I like the CSS abstraction; it's very useful to the extent that the various browsers implement it correctly to spec. But within HTML or out in its own file, it's clumsy, far too wordy, and not all that powerful — and HTML is also extremely clumsy and wordy. Yet I wanted the power of CSS and HTML abstraction, and furthermore I wanted indexes and lists of figures and tables of contents and glossaries and parameters and stacks and pretty-printing and other such goodies. I couldn't find anything even close to the power I could imagine. So I created it myself.
Using wtfm, I can write things like this into a project file or a page's local style area...
[style p <p style="margin-left: 0">[b]</p>[lf]]]
...which, in turn, lets me write on a page...
{p This is a paragraph.}
...thereby abstracting everything about the paragraph. The language is far more capable than just that, but this simple example illustrates one way (not the only way) of getting the content as separated from both the HTML and CSS formatting as possible, which is what makes the actual writing of the documentation or website easy.
Since I write a lot of complex documentation, the benefits accrue to me constantly. Having built up an extensive library of styles in the language, I generate reasonably sized web pages that arrive quickly and with the minimum requests to the web servers, while presenting a minimal load to the client browser, and no coding on a page that doesn't actually need to be there to accomplish the goal of presenting its specific content.
Other solutions exist for extremely simple cases, such as markdown [daringfireball.net], but the ones I looked at wouldn't serve for the tasks I had to accomplish, and I needed to get work done, not hunt for solutions that might not even exist. Hence, wtfm and aa_macro. They do what I wanted done, and as I wrote them, extending, fixing and polishing them as needed is second nature to me.
I have made both available for free, and both are open source. There's a fairly steep learning curve to get at the available power beyond markdown-level usage (though that is certainly dead-simple), but for those who face the kind of workload I do and sport an at least somewhat programming-oriented mindset, it is absolutely worth the time it takes. Also, I listen carefully to the other users. These projects are very much subject to improvement over time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:22PM (1 child)
Cool, thanks for making this tool available! I'll probably spin it up next time I have a >10pg technical doc.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:11PM
Most welcome. :)