Modern WYSIWYG HTML editor?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Well, the thread title says it all, essentially.
I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to editing web pages for about a decade now, and I don’t have a clue of most of the stuff going on on webpages these days.
And that’s fine, all I need to do is to maintain a few pages from the intranet in our company, or more specifically in the part of it I work in.
The deal is, everything fancy, like Javascript and stuff, I basically don’t have to dabble with, that’s handled by the overarching pages.
The pages I need to maintain are basically lot’s of DIV tags with fixed locations, width/height and a few format settings.
Nothing fancy at all.

However, maintaining them by hand is a nightmare, and what little web editors I have access to totally mess up the layout and/or clutter the pages with tons of unusual tags and other crap I don’t need.

I’m looking for something simple, like Netscape Composer back in the day, that just does the little no-frills editing I described without forcing any superficial stuff on me.

Anyone here “in the know” and can recommend me a piece of software?

Of course, free would be nice, but since it’s for work … if it isn’t too expensive, I guess I can get my boss to shell out a few bucks. So don’t let a price tag keep you from recommending something.

Thanks in advance, hivemind!

rezaf

2

AFAIK, Dreamweaver is still the best in the business.

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No such thing, rezaf. And there won’t be in the foreseeable future, HTML5 has some elements which are deliberately hard to WYSIWYG.

You’re basically always better off picking up a web portal to handle these things and finding a skin you don’t mind entirely unusable. Otherwise, you need a full web designer or you’ll be spending forever on it.

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Brian: Wasn’t Dreamweaver, back in the day, almost as famous for messing up handcrafted HTML code as Frontpage? If that’s wrong or doesn’t apply any longer, it might be an option.

Teiman: That’s hardly WYSIWYG as I understand it. It’s a text based editor with preview. Thanks anyway, but I think that’s not what I’m after.

Dawn Falcon: You can see how much out of the loop I am, I hadn’t even thought of HTML5. However, I’d be highly surprised if HTML5 was actually in use in our local intranet. How do I even detect whether it’s HTML5?
Most of the files I intend to edit are REALLY barebone, like a HTML tag, some formatting which I reckon is CSS, a body with a couple of divs and tables, and that’s it.
Nothing fancy at all.

rezaf

6

Since they incorporated Homesite (which I still use, am using right now actually for a project), it apparently got a lot better. I don’t know a WYSIWYG editor that doesn’t fuck up the code in some way, just some are better than others.

7

IN BEFORE SOMEONE SUGGESTS NOTEPAD

I still use FrontPage, or rather its modern successor, Expression Web. It sometimes puts in code I don’t want, but it’s easy to fix. Our web stuff is mostly CMS these days anyway, so I don’t need to do a lot of HTML myself.

8

I’m going to have to insist that you explain this.

9

I recently started using Amaya instead of Word

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

It is decent and open source. Gets the job done for simple stuff.

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I have the impression that nobody write pages anymore with a Wysiwig editor.

Part of it is that wysiwig editors are good for documents. HTML files. But nobody make a webpage with the index “index.html”. Static pages? a thing of the past.

The other part of it, is that now all the webmasters are dead, or are hidden in a deep ice cave. Everybody seems using designers that draw pages in photoshop or similar, the psd is send to a dude that break the design in images, and the result is given to the programmers that use magic electricity to give the thing life. So you need 3 persons to do the work that used to do a single webmaster.

So, using something like the last version of dreamweaver is not sexy anymore. Things that are not sexy don’t get much blog attention, and people is busy tryiing to accomplish much more sexy and interesting things.

People don’t work very hard drawing shadows in Photoshop, cutting then into 100 tiny gif files, and composing the result in dreamweaver. Most people is fighting jquery plugins that add that shadow procedurally using <canvas> <svg> or some builtin CSS3 feature of the browser.

Everybody that used to organize the page using tables is now dead, and buried on the desert of arizone, next to backup tapes of Geocities.

This make so your question is hard to solve. I imagine there are lost villages of old webmaster that still use dreamweaver, and have radios tunned to 90’s music all day long. These villages are closed to the public eye, like Sangri-la, Xanadu or cursed Ireland towns.

jsbin is more the way to go of the 2011. And you sould give a second eye, if you want to be sexy like us, members of the 2011 internet. Do you want to be sexy? HTML5 + CSS3 + JQuery? come here, the water is warm.

Or you can make your company buy some version of dreamweaver. I have not used one in 10 years, but I suppose will still be the best.

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Tieman, I love ya, but as someone who works in web marketing and web programming, lemme just say you haven’t a FREAKING CLUE you’re talking about.

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Hehehehehe… I could be wrong on what everyone is doing, or how people build pages in 2011.

My impression is that creating pages with <TABLE> and tiny gif images, …that type of thing, is dead or almost dead. That people try to compose pages using CSS, with divs, and more semantic html.

What make you think I am that wrong? Have you see the code of most webpages on the internet created recently? the focus is now on CSS, to a point CSS is more important than HTML.

I could create a webpage using only the tag <h1> and css.

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I thought I had made clear, though, that I don’t intend to write any website accessible to the public. In fact, I think our intranet is powered by some ASP.NET backend or something similar that I can and will not edit. But each department can hook in some “custom content” that is supposed to be simple in nature. There’s some limited interaction sometimes, but nothing serious.

I DO agree that the times of frameset webpages with a thousand pixel-measured GIFs that combine into a huge table reflecting a bigger image are likely over. And good riddance.
These days, there’s flash and stuff, and lots of backend-driven systems which make stuff easier. Well, sometimes easier, sometimes different.
I don’t intend to get back into serious web design, so it all doesn’t bother me much.

I’ll check out what was recommended, thanks guys.
And if anyone has additional recommendations - post away.

rezaf

14

Many folks still use flat files. Many of the websites I’ve worked on in my career still use 'em. At my last job, major lead gen portals were create with flat PHP files. PHP doesn’t always mean dynamically generated, for example. Webmasters aren’t also dead, I know and work with many…for example.

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Beautiful.

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And I still recommend this.
http://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com/

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Uhh, what? Flat file doesn’t mean not dynamic, it means not relational.

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Zylon;

There used to be WYSIWYG HTML editors. Now…there are not. HTML/CSS creates a situation where you have files which are very hard to generate properly in a program, and is highly illogical in natural editing terms (it’s a LONG way from how DTP packages work…). I know this, because these were problems which we solved when we did the XHTML and CSS changes for ePub’s last standards process. And behold, there are WYSIWYG tools able to edit files which can be transformed into ePub’s and a native editor, Sigil.

Some of those changes were suggested for inclusion in HTML5. To say that there was scorn and rudeness would to be understating the case. (Also, HTML5’s unique serialisation is going to cause headaches…)

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Sorry about my post.

I was not tryiing to give some usefull advice, but explain that the situation have changed, and people don’t use wysiwig editors as much as before. A good reason can be the one explained by Dawn Falcon.

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If you can or want to use a Mac, check out Rapid Weaver:

With this add on:
http://yourhead.com/stacks/