Web page editors for Windows and Linux

Mark Fisher — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:03:29 +0000

Here is a brief rundown of the best free web page editors for windows and linux:

WYSIWYG Editors

These editors include a preview of the web page, and allow you to edit page elements directly in-place on the page.

However, the previews are never quite the same as the actual page displayed by the browser and should only be used as a guide. These editors are great for pages using html formating, generally composed of tables with fixed size rows and columns. Formating is generally done inline with much less use being made of external stylesheets. Use these editors if you are doing static html such as landing pages, click-throughs and small sites with only one or two articles.

Having said that, Amaya from W3C features extensive CSS editing capabilities and an inline editor. The renderer however is specific to Amaya so you must preview your pages in firefox to see how they will look online. This is always advisable anyhow.

Kompozer (formerly NVU)

This is from the mozilla authors and incorporates an embedded firefox preview. An FTP uploader is included a-la dreamweaver; however I find these unecessary because they are never quite as easy to use as standalone FTP tools such as FileZilla and CuteFTP.

The in-place editor is great; its based on the gecko engine which powers firefox and others, and so it gives you an almost exact preview of your how your site will look online.

Unfortunately this software seems to be rather unstable on both linux and windows, and development seems to have ground to a halt. This is OK if you dont mind saving your work as you edit, and restarting the editor every time it breaks. You may find that the advantages of the embedded browser and the in-place editor make this worth your while.

Amaya

Source: Freebase

This one is from w3 (the www consortium) and has its own page renderer called libwww. Pages built using this package may not look the same as in firefox – you should always check your pages in all browsers anyway before you upload them.

The great thing about Amaya is that you can edit any page whilst you are browsing. You can switch between browse and edit modes.

Amaya makes a lot of use of inline CSS; for example, when the user bolds some text, instead of using depracated tags such as “” amaya will create a “” element and insert the style inline using the style attribute. This makes it much easier to separate formatting from layout; you can extract the inline styles and create css classes which you can then apply to any page element.

It has a UI unlike most other software, which takes some getting used to, designed for fast editing using keyboard shortcuts.

Amaya lacks any support for frames or javascript, but does support SVG, math, and scientific notation, on top of its support for html and css.

Amaya is published by the w3c (worldwide web consortium). Binary releases are here, and the source code can be downloaded here.

The Eclipse Web Tool Platform

Eclipse WTP has a built in page editor but this is not as accessible as other software. The html editor is much better and eclipse has a built in web browser, so these are better used together rather than the in-place editor, until the team release an improved version.

HTML Editors

These editors are for editing html source code and do not feature in-place editing; they do however feature extensive html helper functions and are great for editing javascript, and dom-based pages which utilize css for the formating and html for the layout.

BlueFish

Bluefish is a fairly compact html editor providing all the functions you need to edit html by hand. It is great for advanced authors because of the lack of restrictions (you can include non-html code without difficulty) and its simplicity makes it great for small systems. It has an extensive feature set, including suport for most common language protocols.

On linux you should install it using your distributions package manger, or you can download the sourcecode from the website here.

On windows you can download a port from Google Code here.

Eclipse Web Tools

The html editor is fine and makes full use of the eclipse UI features, such as code-complete, auto-suggest, outline and properties views, and is pretty much complete in terms of its html implementation. Eclipse WTP also contains a javascript editor with library support, and a php editor is available again with library support. It is mainly a developers platform and is not directly set up for website creation. – you may have to download additional tools and do some configuring. If you run your own servers or create software in any language, eclipse will do the bulk of the workload and is easy to extend with its system of features, plugins and web-based update sites. FTP support is also available, as is shell access and a multitude of other services, using the RSE (Remote Systems Explorer) which is also fully extensible.

Eclipse does have an inline page editor but it is not really production ready – selecting areas is quite difficult because the autonavigation does not work as well as it could, and the preview pane will often hide page elements and gets the sizes wrong.

Eclipse can be downloaded via the main site at eclipse.org.

Conclusions

All in all, amaya is the easiest to use out-of-the-box, and is great for creating simple pages very quickly especially when they are based on existing pages. It has no dynamic capabilities or script support.

Amaya will get you going fast and is small enough not to interfere with other processes; it fails on certain code but not too often; when it fails it simply vanishes and does not seem to bring down the entire system. And it keeps backups. If you want to be sure of w3c compliance, check your pages in Amaya.

Komposer is great for testing html/javascript combinations, and for composing html tahle based pages; it is a “poor mans dreamweaver”. Instability is the main failing point of this tool; development seems to have become stagnant.

Bluefish will take you places no other editor can with its ability to open 3000+ files; regex find and replace with subexpressions; wildcard file open; inline pipes using external tools such sed, awk or your own bash script; custom dialogs and key bindings, and it is very compact fitting neatly into your backpack. This link is to the full feature list.

I`ll stick with eclipse for my php and javascript, use amaya to create layouts, kompozer for my landing pages and for page templates, bluefish for fast and easy direct editing of the source code.

Similar Blog & News Articles: Powered by

Similar Products: Powered by

	JavaScript Video Tutorial Training. 13 Hours in 124 Video Lessons on 1 DVD :: Amazon Complete video tutorial training for JavaScript coding. Lessons are presented in step-by-step videos with a total running time of over 9 hou
	Total Training for Studio 8 Bundle MacOSx Win 00 XP DVD 7 DVDs, 43 Hours Run Time 151419593 :: Amazon Hosts, John Ulliman and Janine Warner, share their expert knowledge in how to design and develop complex websites using state-of-the art too
	CSS Cascading Style Sheets - Video Tutorial Training. 4.5 Hours in 29 Video Lessons on 1 DVD :: Amazon Complete video tutorial training for CSS Cascading Style Sheet coding. Lessons are presented in step-by-step videos with a total running tim
	Greater :: Amazon No reward is greater than education. No education is greater than learning that websites that automatically resize your browser window suck
	Learning CCK for Drupal :: Amazon The Lullabot Learning Series continues with a hands-on look at Drupal's Content Construction Kit (commonly known as CCK). In this tutorial v
	MEL 101: Fundamentals :: Amazon In this two-disc set on MEL, Kevin Mannens introduces the rich possibilities of Maya s Embedded Language. With over ten hours of lecture, Ke
	TextExpander :: Amazon Save time and avoid repetitive typing with TextExpander. You can define customized abbreviations for frequently-used text and images, also k

	4 Steps to Starting Your Own Information Business :: Amazon Terry Deans shows step-by-step how to get started in a highly profitable information business online. Create books, ebooks, CDs, DVDs and mo
	Cta Digital Ip-hsf Dj Series Headphones :: Amazon CTA strives to create consistent quality in its products and service. The company experienced phenomenal growth due to its highly trained te
	Position Sizing for Maximum Profits :: Amazon Traders spend a great deal of time and effort deciding which pattern to follow or which stock to trade. However, when it comes time to actua
	The FXCM FOREX Course: An Introduction To Currency Trading with Ponsi, Ed :: Amazon Have you ever wondered why currency exchange rates fluctuate? Would you like to make money from this fluctuation? If so, the FXCM Forex Cour
	The Insider's Guide to Forex Trading :: Amazon The opportunities in the Forex market have attracted many traders but, is it where you want to achieve trading success? Let insider Kathy Li

Logicfish » Authoring

Web page editors for Windows and Linux

WYSIWYG Editors

Kompozer (formerly NVU)

Amaya

The Eclipse Web Tool Platform

HTML Editors

BlueFish

Eclipse Web Tools

Conclusions

Similar Blog & News Articles: Powered by

Similar Wikipedia Articles: Powered by

Similar Products: Powered by

Online Training and Promotions

Similar Blog & News Articles: Powered by

Similar Wikipedia Articles: Powered by

Similar Products: Powered by