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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: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:41PM (9 children)
It's actually really odd: AFAIK there are no decent tools for simple, static sites. There are all sorts of overly complicated frameworks, but for a simple, static site, directly editing the HTML and CSS is about the best solution. Sad...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by agr on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:51PM
LibreOffice has an html editor that seems to work for simple stuff.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:16PM (3 children)
I wrote a framework with 2 way databinding that allows you compose your page in markdown or HTML.
It is standards based and will render nicely all the way back to IE11 using only the polyfills it absolutely needs.
It's not WYSIWG but using modern coding tools like vscode you can crank through the design elements pretty quickly.
I called it telepathy because it's designed to be so easy to use it's like it read your mind.
If you'd like to give it a spin, the demos are here.
https://telepathic-elements.github.io/demos/index.html [github.io]
More info is here...
https://github.com/telepathic-elements/telepathic-element [github.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 03 2018, @11:30PM (2 children)
Tried the "simple demo" got a blank page, apparently it can't handle an environment without javascript. Oh well...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:18AM (1 child)
Yeah sorry,modern web development using things like WebComponents are a javascript based specification, there isn't a way to make that degrade gracefully because you're not creating a static document, you're building an application by composing elements together.
What this tool does is to allow you to specify the UI layer, as a template in whatever you prefer, HTML or Markdown, and then seamlessly bind to the controller without the need to explicitly declare bindings.
My point was more or less that with any modern code editor, I've built a handy tool to let you connect any controller to any view doing nothing more than inserting ${var} into the template where you want the controller's this.var to show up. You can get 2 way databinding for free by setting the value of the element(s) to ${var}
I apologize, if you're just building a static document, the tool isn't helpful.
But if you're trying to build an interactive application and things like Angular or React feel overly complicated, this does 99% of what they and it does it without the need to import a billion scripts. It tries to do so in an easy and natural way, convention over configuration so to speak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:03AM
I opened https://telepathic-elements.github.io/demos/simple-demo.html [github.io] in firefox. It's a blank page. Is that right? I can't see what it's meant to do from the HTML.
Same for https://telepathic-elements.github.io/demos/qr-code-demo.html [github.io]
Tried in Firefox and Palemoon on Linux.
Here's the code:
Umatrix has allowed a script to run from the host domain.
I've seen corporate sites like this. I've rung businesses on the phone to tell them that their site doesn't work.
JavaScript is enabled. The css and html files are being loaded from the host site. There is an error about loading 'Roboto' css from the googleapi fonts tracking site, but otherwise no errors. Nothing in the console.
For the hangman one I can see:
but there is no content.
What do we need to do to get these pages to work in Firefox on Linux?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:33PM (1 child)
It's not really odd actually, well at least it makes perfect sense to me.
For very simple static sites a text editor has always been the best way, and always will be, and those people who still want very simple static sites today will be the sort of people who are comfortable with a text editor and raw html - the web was, after all, never meant to be WYSIWYG. Capable text editors with fancy html modes are legion on every platform, pick any or stick with Emacs / vi as you wish.
For anything vaguely complex graphically, WYSIWYG-web is dead because the rise of mobile devices has finally beaten the clue into marketing's thick skulls that not everyone has the same damned screen size (or keyboard or...) and "the page must look pixel-for-pixel same as this photoshop proof" is clearly an insane specification. For some of us it always was clearly insane, but we were fighting against the tide of marketing PhotoShop/DreamWeaver/Flash jockeys at the start of this century. Thank Jobs those days are gone.
As for offline capability, well it isn't necessary to have everything in the editor anymore, a modern low-end laptop can easily run web servers for testing and the browsers and emulators for the clients and devices you want to test with / support. A more capable developer laptop can host VMs and emulate your production servers, but if (as is likely these days) you are going to host production on cloud instances anyway, you might as well develop on cloud instances from the start and pick up platform issues earlier.
DreamWeaver apparently still lives on, but if there is ever a time when there is a party to drive a web-is-not-*****-WYSIWYG stake through its cold undead heart, then let me know because I will gladly help wield the hammer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:37PM
"We use vi, son. They use emacs."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:18AM
It's called "Dreamweaver 2"
or NVU if that floats your boat.
They work.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday October 04 2018, @12:18PM
Maybe directly editing the HTML and CSS is the best solution for a simple, static site, once you've ruled out using a CMS?
Purists would say that HTML markup should be strictly semantic, and the rendering entirely up to the browser, so any concept of WYSIWYG would be considered harmful wrongthink. Although I'd always temper that with a healthy slice of pragmatism, its not a bad aspiration as long as you don't let the perfect be the enemy of
the goodgetting any work done - and modern HTML5 lets you get slightly closer to the ideal. Using a "graphical" editor for HTML/CSS is always going to be like washing your feet with socks on.