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Originally Posted by chrishirst
plenty of other editors around. and cheaper then DW 
1st Page 2000 Great value for the price
CoffeeCup shareware and pretty cheap
NVU OpenSource WYSIWYG editor
Amaya W3Cs opensource editor
Try them all. I have but still work mostly in Edit+ (code editor btw) |
Update for anyone who's interested.
I've had a reasonable look at all of them except edit+.
My comments are from a clumsy user of anything involving direct HTML coding, although I can hand code if I have to with my big book beside me and a lot of time. I'm more a designer who wants ease of use, which Web Easy gives.
Nvu would be my favourite, if it worked properly. Clean and neat to use so far as tools etc go. Can switch between code and WYSIWYG views. Nicely supported by cleanly designed and professional Help. Unfortunately there are some frustrating problems in the way it works. Doesn't live up to its advertising, e.g. no way could I drag and drop images. Probably be a really nice item if it works through another version or two. Searched Google for solutions and found my opinions were shared by people who looked like they actually know what they're doing.
Amaya is a good idea but has a way to go to get near Nvu. Been a while since anyone bothered to fix a couple of recorded bugs. A bit disappointing for W3C.
1st Page 2000 got me in as a straight HTML editor with no WYSIWYG coding problems after I'd decided I might be better off sticking with Web Easy designs I'd made and clean them up with 1st Page without the WYSIWYG problems. Only problem is I can't get code into 1st Page, either as whatever proprietary code Web Easy uses or as as HTML 3.2 through View, Source. Don't know if it's Windows or 1st Page problem but error messages come up and stop me.
Coffee Cup is OK but annoying with a few minor things like its stupid Cool and No Way instead of OK / Yes and No. Not impressed with an unprofessional amount of typos in its Help documents, including gems like <sub> = subscript and <sub> = superscript, but its coding got <sub> and <sup> right on the examples I looked at. Unlike 1st Page 2000 it accepted the HTML code in both proprietary and HTML 3.2 forms it's written in. Better still it produced the right page in its WYSIWYG mode from the Web Easy code from View, Source, which is more than anything else has managed to do so far. CC seems a bit clumsy in some respects (and very, very clumsy and slow compared with Web Easy in just about every respect) and it's not my intuitive favourite, but for dealing with Web Easy it's far and away the most practical of the lot. Actually, the only one that works with WE.
Web Easy is more like a combined graphics and website designer than the others I've summarised. It can draw shapes, drop and drag just about anything on screen (text, shape, image, whatever), and generally do stuff that none of the others above could do in a fit.
The price I pay is that in coding it renders just about everything as images rather than text.
Given that the websites I'm designing are going to have a minimum of half a million others ahead of them in any search engine, I'm thinking it doesn't matter whether they are text searchable or not. They could have searchable text a hundred feet tall and still nobody would ever find them.
I'm thinking I might stick with Web Easy but modify some bits of it with Coffee Cup, like using CC to insert readable text in the early words so that they're searchable.
I'm also thinking that using HTML 3.2 mightn't be the worst thing. Most browsers support it, even if its being depreciated under W3C standards. Web Easy doesn't need CSS or anything else under HTML 4 versions. Or XHTML or whatever.
The aim of the exercise is to get a decent website up, which Web Easy can do even if it offends the technical standards of people who know how to do it better technically.
Anyway, a big thanks to chrishirst for putting me on to those editors because I think that Coffee Cup, which is probably my least favourite in many respects, might work with my Web Easy code to do what I need.
