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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, 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.
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