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>From KHARKE at mednet.swmed.edu  Thu Feb 18 05:39:20 1999
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Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 07:40:10 -0600
From: "Karen Harker" <KHARKE at mednet.swmed.edu>
To: <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Favorite HTML editor and page authoring
	software?
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The Library has supported using AOLPress for creating Web pages for several reasons:
1) It's free to educational institutions
2) It's easy to download and get started in
3) It's WYSIWYG and includes a decent, if slow, browser
4) It does not add extraneous code

There are a few disadvantages:
1) It's just HTML - it does not recognize DHTML tags, CSS tags, or XML tags
2) It's not being updated
3) It cannot help with other tools, such as Javascript, CGI, etc.

For most of our staffs' and clients' uses, AOLPress is the best product.  Some of our staff use Dreamweaver, and a few brave souls (including myself) are venturing into FrontPage territory because:
1) it's being used by more and more staff
2) it's part of the Microsoft Product Agreement with many universities, including ours (students, faculty and staff can get it dirt cheap for their own machines)
3) it provides certain "wizards" which can create such things as a discussion forum.

We are trying to figure out ways to work around the irritating problem of extraneous code.  I think it will involve the use of multiple editors to achieve the best page.  For instance, using AOLPress to develop standard HTML pages, then using FrontPage for the fancy pages.



Karen R. Harker
Web Developer
UT Southwestern Medical Library
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX  75235-9049
http://www.swmed.edu/home_pages/library/

>>> "Thomas Dowling" <tdowling at ohiolink.edu> 2/18/99 7:29:22 AM >>>

>Although most of my HTML is done in a text editor, I'm thinking of
getting
>a program that will help write cgi scripts, as I'm told Front Page does.

FrontPage helps with CGI scripts?  I wasn't aware of that--I thought it
only steered you toward ASP.

>
>Would anyone care to recommend their favorites, or steer me clear of the
>ones they found difficult or frustrating to use?
>
>Ideally, I want to have one that will allow me to "resist" its
suggestions
>about my current HTML.  I've found that with Pagemill and some other
>web writing software, if you take an existing, reasonably clean HTML page
>and try to add new text in the editor, it will also alter all your
>previous tags, even if your HTML works and is is relatively clean.  (For
>example, I find that existing tables will get new spacing because some
>editors insist that a <P> tag start all text within a <TD> box.
>

The last time I tested this, every graphical HTML editor I tried, except
one, made substantive (and usually invalid) changes to my markup without
telling me.  The one exception was HoTMetaL Pro.  Several tag-based
editors were happy to open my existing HTML and save it without silently
revising my markup.

I originally posted this to Web4Lib in September of 1997, and it's in the
archive as
<URL:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/archive/9709/0389.html>.  I
looked at some of the available editors again last fall and didn't observe
much change.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu