Sunday, December 23, 2007

WYSIWYG Free HTML Editors

We've been looking for HTML Editors, with the following requirements:

  1. Free
  2. WYSIWYG
  3. Multiplatform

Kompozer:
http://www.kompozer.net/
Looks fine, with site manager and FTP included.
The one thing we don't like about Kompozer is that reformats the source code when you open or save a file. It kind of soft-wraps the lines in a most weird manner.
You can use the HandCoder plug-in, together with the Tidy HTML plug-in.

Another worrying issue is that it hasn't been updated for over a year and the bug reports page is overcrowded:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=170132&atid=853122

SeaMonkey:
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Looks good enough, frequently updated and with lots of extensions/plug-ins.
But it also reformats the code in pretty same the same way as Kompozer. No wonder, because as Kompozer and its predecessor, "Composer" it is based on code from the old Mozilla/Netscape suite.

Amaya:
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Probably the best option which is available for Linux, Windows and all flavours of MacOS X.
It supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1, MathML 2.0, many CSS 2 features, and includes SVG support (transformation, transparency, and SMIL animation). You can display and partially edit XML documents.
However, it doesn't handle very well documents created with other editors, specially when you try to edit a table-based html file, it does some strange visualization quirks that forces you to restart the program over and over again, a bug that generally does not happen if you build the file from the ground up in Amaya,
The interface is quite different to any commonly used editor and it is geared towards W3C's protocols, since it is the "official" W3C's Editor and Browser.
Upcoming version 1.0 does look much better, with a contextual menu, a customized user interface, themes, and a new style panel to style documents.

A highly recommended option is Bluefish, which although is not WYSIWYG, it's got a truly WYSIWYN (What You See Is What You Need) interface.
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/features.html
But it only runs on Linux/Mac.
To run it on Windows you'd need the Cygwin package for Bluefish:
ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/cygwinports/release/GNOME/bluefish/

We have opened a thread about this topic at Google Groups that you can read here:
alt.www.webmaster

1 comment:

Gadget Inspector said...

Great reviews,
Thanks