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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: 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.