HTML Editors

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Mark,

I hate to switch topics here (and this may even be a good topic for a new thread…)

Your comments regarding using FrontPage to manage a website interested me. I was a big FrontPage user a few versions back. However, once I learned a bit more about hand-coding websites I quickly saw that FrontPage’s editing capabilities were a joke! Like many other MS products, FP wants to do things ITS way. I also realized how “messy” the code ends up when relying on FrontPage server extensions.

To make a long story even longer, I developed my first major website completely by hand-coding using the Microsoft Script Editor (included with Office 2000). As you can imagine, there is little in the way of site management included with such a simple code editor. Then I discovered Dreamweaver…(imagine a ray of sunshine piercing the dark clouds with Handel’s Hallaluia chorus playing in the background…)

Dreamweaver MX has turned out to be one of the best tools I have ever used! The WYSIWYG environment is perfect for those who are scared of code, but it also sports one of the best code editors around. The best thing is that it always keeps the code “pure”, never adding extra mess or propritary code like FrontPage. The site management feature (the whole reason I took off on this tangent) is at least as good as FrontPage, if not better! AND Dreamweaver is designed to work with any server platform (ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP/MySQL, etc…). It handles data-driven applications brilliantly! (Although I still write most of my data driven web applications in Visual Studio…)

Bottom line: Dreamweaver has really changed my web-design life! Learn more about Dreamweaver

Sorry for the … I just thought I would put in a plug for a great tool that many web developers often overlook…

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I’ll aboslutely second Mark’s comment about Dreamweaver MX.

If I couldn’t use it, I don’t think I’d do any web development stuff.

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Looks great, and Studio MX, which includes Dreamweaver MX, seems to be 4-products-for-the-price-of-2. Is anyone using Flash MX, Fireworks MX, or FreeHand MX, or their predecessors and have anything to report on those components?

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Funny that you ask. I have the entire StudioMX. I use everything except for Freehand (I have version 10). I use either Fireworks or PaintShopPro for vector graphics work.

Flash is wonderful! However, there is a bit of a learning curve to it – especially for VB developers. For those who are not familiar with it, Flash uses ActionScript – a language based on JavaScript – for automation and interaction. Also it takes a little bit of effort to understand the concept of layers and timelines. The output generated by Flash is typically VERY small in filesize, making it perfect for web uses.

The overall value of StudioMX is incredible! As Jefferson mentioned, the price is about $800 US which is roughly the price of two of its individual applications. It also comes with a developer edition of Cold Fuxion MX, a powerful server development environment that easily handles database connections, XML, and many other tasks that take much more code in other environments.

If you have the need to do any web design or development you should STRONGLY consider using parts or all of Macromedia’s Studio MX. (I have no affiliation with Macromedia. I’m just a very happy user.)

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I’ve always heard good things about Dreamweaver. Does it do XHTML?

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Yes – it does offer XHTML compliance although extended support might require a free Extension from Macromedia. See Dreamweaver’s Features page

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