Really Good WYSISWG HTML Editor for Ubuntu

[tomreid]

Hi

Does anyone know of a really good HTML Editor for Ubuntu.

I started off my website (www.kirkcaldybands.com) on Dreamweaver on a mac, which I regret spending money on as it was expensive and too full featured for what I wanted.

I tried Kompozer for a bit, but it was not stable on 9.04 (I know there is a known issue).

I just downloaded Bluefish today, it looks very full featured, but is it WYSIWYG?

I've just defaulted back to Seamonkey. Id does the job but is really old.

I learned some HTML scripting once, but decided life was too short, so really need WYSWYG.

I'm not good at compiling, etc, so would prefer something that's in the repositories or at least has a .deb installer.

Anyone have any ideas?

Seems there is a bit of a gap in the available software.

cheers

[ikt]

There was a thread about this not to long ago, it was suggested the best editor was Dreamweaver 8 running in wine.

Thread here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1376031

[hessiess]

There is no such thing as a good WYSIWYG HTML editor for ANY platform, they all produce horrible HTML/CSS. Just learn HTML, it is NOT difficult, you can easily learn the basics of HTML and CSS in just a day or two.

[Sand & Mercury]

There is no such thing as a good WYSIWYG HTML editor for ANY platform, they all produce horrible HTML/CSS. Just learn HTML, it is NOT difficult.
I'm really inclined to go with this and then suggest Aptana Studio as your development suite. If you're serious about making web pages/sites you WILL eventually have to learn HTML anyway, so you might as well get it over with sooner rather than later.

If you absolutely must have WYSIWYG though, grab Kompozer off their website (last I checked you can get straight binaries from there, just download and open) -- otherwise yeah, go with DreamWeaver via Wine.

[Dr Belka]

If you wanna make a really nice web site, do it in vim

[hessiess]

If you wanna make a really nice web site, do it in vim

Vim is a very good text editor, but has nothing to do with website quality. ``The artist paints the masterpiece, not the brushes'';)

[The Real Dave]

Hi

Does anyone know of a really good HTML Editor for Ubuntu.

I started off my website (www.kirkcaldybands.com) on Dreamweaver on a mac, which I regret spending money on as it was expensive and too full featured for what I wanted.

I tried Kompozer for a bit, but it was not stable on 9.04 (I know there is a known issue).

I just downloaded Bluefish today, it looks very full featured, but is it WYSIWYG?

I've just defaulted back to Seamonkey. Id does the job but is really old.

I learned some HTML scripting once, but decided life was too short, so really need WYSWYG.

I'm not good at compiling, etc, so would prefer something that's in the repositories or at least has a .deb installer.

Anyone have any ideas?

Seems there is a bit of a gap in the available software.

cheers

Try getting the latest version of Kompozer from their site. It was stable for me back on Jaunty :)

[lovinglinux]

There is no such thing as a good WYSIWYG HTML editor for ANY platform, they all produce horrible HTML/CSS. Just learn HTML, it is NOT difficult, you can easily learn the basics of HTML and CSS in just a day or two.

+1

If you don't want to spend the time with HTML, CSS and PHP, why don't you install a CMS platform like Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/) or Wordpress (http://wordpress.org)?

I'm not criticizing, but with Joomla you could have a professional looking site in a couple of hours. There are hundreds of free templates (http://www.bestofjoomla.com/index.php?x=47&y=10&TagsTo=36_44&option=com_bestoftemplate&task=viewcategory&fsort=&fcolor=&ffav=&fedit=&Itemid=46), but also some template clubs (http://www.rockettheme.com), from where you can get really beautiful stuff for a small fee. Then you can spend the time you would need to create the html code into customizing your template.

I have been using Joomla for years, both personally and professionally. It is a very powerful CMS, with lots of extensions to install. Recently I switched my personal sites to Wordpress and I'm loving it, since it requires less effort to administer and has really nice plugins.

[Kenny_Strawn]

WYSIWYG is really a way to deceive the user into thinking that they don't need to know the code when in reality they do. If you really want to create a web site, you need to know the code.

However, I do honestly believe that WYSIWYG is time-saving. It really allows the user to write HTML in a much faster time than HTML and CSS by themselves.

I know, because my mother is a Web designer in training. She is taking an online class through IADT, and has designed a series of class sites. Her name is Wanda Strawn, if you don't know.

As far as the best WYSIWYG editor for Linux, I would say Dreamweaver in Wine, only because my mother is used to DW. However, I am thinking of trying Kompozer and seeing how it works.

[darkmire]

I agree with what the others say about learning HTML as it really helps even if you use a WYSIWYG editor. Have a try using Kompozer. It's better than Seamonkey but it will never be Dreamweaver. I suggest you download and compile it from the www.kompozer.net website as the package in the repository is a bit old and doesn't run properly.

Mark


Hi

Does anyone know of a really good HTML Editor for Ubuntu.

I started off my website (www.kirkcaldybands.com) on Dreamweaver on a mac, which I regret spending money on as it was expensive and too full featured for what I wanted.

I tried Kompozer for a bit, but it was not stable on 9.04 (I know there is a known issue).

I just downloaded Bluefish today, it looks very full featured, but is it WYSIWYG?

I've just defaulted back to Seamonkey. Id does the job but is really old.

I learned some HTML scripting once, but decided life was too short, so really need WYSWYG.

I'm not good at compiling, etc, so would prefer something that's in the repositories or at least has a .deb installer.

Anyone have any ideas?

Seems there is a bit of a gap in the available software.

cheers

[whiskeylover]

There is no such thing as a good WYSIWYG HTML editor for ANY platform, they all produce horrible HTML/CSS. Just learn HTML, it is NOT difficult, you can easily learn the basics of HTML and CSS in just a day or two.


And while we're at it, lets get rid of PHP, Python, Ruby, C++ etc. And lets all start programming in assembly.

And for the record, Dreamweaver produces the cleanest HTML/CSS of any of the HTML tools I've seen out there, although its not for Linux.

[hessiess]

And while we're at it, lets get rid of PHP, Python, Ruby, C++ etc. And lets all start programming in assembly.

Those are two completely different issues, PHP, Python and Ruby are high level scripting languages, C/C++ are medium level compiled programming language. They were all designed to solve some specific problem, which they have successfully achieved, hence there popularity.

HTML on the other hand is primarily a language for applying meaning to content, such as defining some part of a text as a heading, another part as a paragraph and so on, the exact formatting of this is controlled by style sheets and the browser, two browsers NEVER render a page exactly the same. This is in direct opposition to the whole WYSIWYG paradigm which defines that the content is styled by the user and will AWAYS look the same(within physical limitations), regardless of the output device. Visual HTML editors emulate WYSIWYG using a large amount of inline styling, which results in messy and unmaintainable code.

Also a large amount of modern web design techniques such as completely fluid layouts and page elements with rounded corners rely on techniques which would be next to imposable to implement in a visual way and require at least some knowledge of the underlying languages.

The paradigm used by HTML is known as WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) and encourages the separation of styling and content, resulting in much easier maintenance. For example changing the style of all the headings on an entire website which correctly separates content and formatting only requires changing ONE CSS file.

Still don't believe that WYSIWYG editors produce awful code, just take a look at the source of the page linked to in the op: http://www.kirkcaldybands.com/. The code isnt valid XHTML eather, though there aren't many errors:http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kirkcaldybands.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

On a slightly different issue, I would not recommend creating a website using just static html unless it:


Only contains one or two pages or:
you never intend to change it.


Using a CMS makes maintenance substantially easier, my current portfolio is static HTML, using includes to reduce duplication, but it still takes an hour or two just to add one page to it.

[whiskeylover]

HTML on the other hand is primarily a language for applying meaning to content, such as defining some part of a text as a heading, another part as a paragraph and so on, the exact formatting of this is controlled by style sheets and the browser, two browsers NEVER render a page exactly the same. This is in direct opposition to the whole WYSIWYG paradigm which defines that the content is styled by the user and will AWAYS look the same(within physical limitations), regardless of the output device. Visual HTML editors emulate WYSIWYG using a large amount of inline styling, which results in messy and unmaintainable code.An HTML design tool is still useful, irrespective of what you just said. It might not produce perfect HTML in all cases, but most tools let you edit HTML directly. But they do save you a LOT of development time. Any sensible webdev team working on a large website will use some sort of HTML design tool, and will not code all HTML by hand. That is just silly.


The paradigm used by HTML is known as WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) and encourages the separation of styling and content, resulting in much easier maintenance. For example changing the style of all the headings on an entire website which correctly separates content and formatting only requires changing ONE CSS file.A lot of tools recognize CSS and work with it perfectly well. Give dreamweaver a try. It works seamless with CSS, even lets you store styles in a seperate document. And applies it to elements on the fly.


Still don't believe that WYSIWYG editors produce awful code, just take a look at the source of the page linked to in the op: http://www.kirkcaldybands.com/. The code isnt valid XHTML eather, though there aren't many errors:http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Inline&group=0 (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kirkcaldybands.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

That was generated using OpenOffice. Its hardly a standard HTML editor. Again, try dreamweaver, and see how many errors you get. Infact, dreamweaver has an inbuilt error checking mechanism that alerts you when you try to use elements that are incompatible with some browsers.

[tomreid]

Thanks guys.

I tried out Kompozer from the latest repositories and it seems to work fine.

I kind of agree with most of the comments around knowing the HTML is the ideal way to really design webpages well. In an ideal world I'd love to learn it.

Joomla looks a very interesting solution too.

cheers

[Tibuda]

Have you tried Amaya from W3C?

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

[MasterNetra]

...Joomla looks a very interesting solution too.

cheers

Wouldn't happen to know of or have a .deb of version 1.5.15? Couldn't find a PPA for it.

[twola]

Why does everyone seem to bash the fact that someone may want to use a WYSIWYG as a means to speed up development time. I have over 15 years experience in professional development with various fortune 500 companies. However I use a WYSIWYG as a means to quickly spit out code, view source and make tweaks accordingly. I feel that such a set up helps in a speedy and effective development rather than trial and error procedures.

It is OK to use tools that benefit you as a developer. I completely understand that a tool like DreamWeaver may not produce valid HTML however it helps me spit out the framework which i can tweak to my needs.

If you maintain that attitude than please go ahead and start coding in Assembly language as that would be way more efficient and fast since you can get away with optimized code. However if you have any sense you would not want to do that since it would take a very long time to just produce a valid "Hello World" string.

Enough Said.

[matthew]

Since this is a 6 month old thread, resurrected only for the purpose of a response more likely to cause a flamewar than a real discussion, I think the thread has outlived its usefulness. Feel free to start a new thread on the topic with new information if you are interested.