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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: 4, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:19PM (20 children)
They're dead because they were all pretty awful. Always were, always will be. People who know enough to use those things properly also know enough to write the actual code; and people who need expensive tools for editing websites are probably working on websites too complex for basic WYSIWYG editors anyway.
Also damn near everything can save to HTML these days anyway. Hell, I could build a web page in my friggin' email client and save it as HTML and upload to a host. There's also no shortage on online tools...usually they're linked to purchasing some service though, because nobody will pay for a dedicated tool so they mostly serve as a form of advertising and "value-add". And it's harder to restrict it to your own service if you offer the tool as an offline download, so it's all online-only. Which shouldn't be much of a problem since it's hard to build a website if you don't have a decent internet connection to begin with.
Personally, I build websites with Notepad++ at work where I'm stuck on Windows, and Brackets or Nano when I get to use a real OS.
If you can't manage that, then go pay SquareSpace or whoever else will let you just stuff your information into one of their prepared templates.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:36PM (12 children)
I am not sure about the "always will be" part, because I believe that it would be useful for someone to make one with something like the below features:
Does this sound about right?
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:45PM (1 child)
I'm sorry, but for proper modern web design, the necessary functions are:
- automated white space insertion
- automated tracking code insertion
- automated social media trackers insertion
- automated ad provider linking
- automated deletion of technical data, with optional automated replacement by useless marketing drivel and generic pictures of happy things
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:09PM
And fifty people on twitter complaining about how we need more people of color spaces inserted into web pages
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zinho on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:25PM (5 children)
The problem with any WYSIWYG editor for the Web is that it has to show you something as "what you get", and there isn't a single "what": each rendering engine has its own capabilities and quirks, and browsers sharing the same rendering engine also manage to give different output in many cases. A good WYSIWYG editor would allow you to tie in several alternate rendering engines and switch between them at will. This would result in a development environment that gives a reasonable approximation of the target browsers' behavior, while also being guaranteed to get some specific quirky behavior wrong as an edge case compared to any specific browser. This assumes, of course, that your page has no backend that it needs to pull queries from in order to function; otherwise, the editor needs to simulate the web server's behavior as well.
The only real way to see "what you get" in Web development is to publish to an instance of the web server that will be hosting the page, then load it in an actual browser.
I don't mean by that to say there's no value in WYSIWYG editors as a tool; I really like your list of proposed features. HoT MetaL Pro back in the day hit several of those bullet points, and I preferred it over Frontpage and Dreamweaver (probably dating myself here). As long as I only expected it to be a decent-guess preview for what a browser might display then it was useful in that role. Just as often, I was using a simple text editor with syntax highlighting, as that did the job just as well and often faster.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:05PM (2 children)
Which sounds like a great feature for a web IDE, but that program would no longer be WYSIWYG. The whole point of WYSIWYG is that you design what the web page should *look like*, then the editor goes and builds the code to actually force it to display that way on all reasonable/expected/supported rendering engines. Which, as you've noted, isn't really possible....and is part of the reason you end up with convoluted code and a mess of scripting libraries, because they have to find workarounds for all of the different behaviors of different browsers, including potentially reinventing new standards so they can backport the feature to an older browser (or simply not supporting the newer features at all).
It gets even worse when you consider that these programs are often built for use by *designers*. I did web dev for a designer once. Lots of "move this half an inch up" at which point I'd have to guess at their screen size/resolution/DPI, alter the spacing by some guestimate number of pixels/ems, ask them to try again, and screw with my numbers a bit more when they come back and say "That only moved three eighths of an inch" or "it didn't move at all" if the issue is a browser difference. A web developer understands that this is how the Internet is *intended* to work; a designer is going to be filing bug reports because what they saw was not what they got.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:34PM
Well said.
I believe Frontpage was explicitly catering to the desires of people who thought your first paragraph was a catalog of good ideas. Of course, Microsoft simplified the process of making their web pages look exactly like a Word document by only targeting IE, and heavily leveraging proprietary tags. Dreamweaver, in contrast, catered to the designers you mentioned in your second paragraph and their exact positioning fetish.
I think the problem with webpage editing software is that programmers aren't the target market - if you know how to write code, then you're already using a text editor to write your web pages and you're happy with it. As a result, we aren't likely to spend money on a fancy editor that does a poor job of helping us with our work. And as long as the target market is people who couldn't hand-code the page to begin with, legible/easy-to-maintain output is low on the priority list for features.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 4, Funny) by sjames on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:24PM
A designer is a delusional being that insists on spending thousands on specially calibrated monitors and office lighting so they can produce an ad slick that looks exactly what they see on their screen. All so I can see it entirely differently anyway because I'm reading it while wearing tinted glasses on a train with dubious quality lighting or in my living room that definitely does not have calibrated lighting.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:19PM (1 child)
Except you actually mean a bunch of different browsers, because there are sometimes major differences between how different browsers behave, e.g. some of them evaluate CSS in a different priority ordering.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:37PM
Exactly. Bonus points for running multiple versions of each browser in parallel in case different releases of the same browser acted differently. Lightweight virtual machines became my friend pretty quickly when they became available.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:26PM
Yeah, that sounds alright...but I'll believe it's possible to meet all of those at once as soon as I see a single piece of software which does it,..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:50PM (2 children)
https://grapedrop.com [grapedrop.com] check your boxes
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @01:03AM (1 child)
went to grapedrop in Firefox, couldn't read the faint/disconnected-stroke font, useless
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:13AM
They have the right idea though. Forgive them for their screwed up design. Perhaps it is incentive to fix it and send them a pull request.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:05PM
Interesting its sort of cross platform problem. For a good laugh try android development using android studio and its WYSIWYG editor. The fundamental problem in both cases seems to be evolution of the language is faster than evolution of the WYSIWYG although end user devices seem to render well.
In Android Studio you can use the layout editor to do a... TextView like from 2010 and it'll work, but if you want to do Material Design stuff thats only 3 or 4 years old, thats far too new to be supported, so if you want to do TextInputLayouts with TextInputEditTexts inside using androidx the layout editor changes from WYSIWYG render mode to WTF render mode. Oh well, maybe someday Android devs will have a dev environment that supports stuff written after 2013 or so. And yes I am using a beta canary (and if you don't know what that is, its kinda like sausage you better off not knowing).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:30PM (2 children)
I was once turned down for a web development job because, although I could configure the web server and hand-write HTML and CSS and Javascript and PHP and Perl and run a SQL database, I had never used Dreamweaver. The manager wanted someone who knew Dreamweaver and not someone who could learn it in two weeks, so they started looking for a newbie from the local community college whose entire webdev experience was taking one course in Dreamweaver. I was unqualified.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @08:52PM
If you don't bother with the WYSIWYG features in Dreamweaver, it's basically a text editor with a built-in FTP client. You could have just lied.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:15PM
Are you me?
Similar experience, what made it more amusing in my case was that at one point in time there were 200 web servers in the UK, I ran five of them and set up 4 of the others and updated content, created graphics etc. on all of them..so one way or another in the early 90's I was responsible for 4.5% of the UK's servers and their content, to be then told no Dreamweaver experience, no job was, I suppose, a bit of a slap in the face, but I took it as more like the final sign that it was time to move on..
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:04PM (2 children)
Brackets has a Windows version, so you could run it there too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @11:55PM (1 child)
Only if his 1) boss 2) IT dept let him...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 04 2018, @01:31PM
Well, technically Notepad++ isn't officially approved either, but half the company uses it...thankfully it doesn't require being actually installed since we don't have admin rights.
I do actually prefer Notepad++ over Brackets anyway though. Brackets is more or less the least bad text editor I've found for Linux. Kate is probably my favorite text editor of all time, but I don't use KDE anymore so I don't want to have all of that bloat installed and loaded just for a text editor...and when I last used it, it was crashing and having various display issues pretty frequently anyway.