Choosing the right web page editor for you?
By Kevin | October 22, 2007
Many times I have seen people ask on other web forums and in chat rooms the question “What is the best web page editor. The most common answer to that question is that Dreamweaver is currently industry standard. I believe however the best text editor a person can choose is the one they are most comfortable with in general.
For some cost may be a factor but if they figure in the cost of their time the price of a web editor or any piece of software to do their job better will pay for itself the more they use it professionally.
I have seen developers that prefer and are most comfortable with notepad or other free versions of text editors even some that developed web pages with VI. It does not mean that any of them has chosen the wrong editor.
The average person that wants to be a web designer and asks that question has very little or no knowledge of (x)HTML or CSS let alone any of the more formal programming languages or server side interpolated languages. It is for that reason that a beginner should start off with a what you see is what you get editor (WYSIWYG) such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage or Microsoft Expressions Web.
As I mentioned earlier Dreamweaver is currently industry standard and one of the hidden advantages it has is it will allow you to view the pages in a split view of code and design view at the same time. This feature will also help you to learn the code faster as you practice it regularly.
You can click on a spot in the design view window and it will bring your curser to that spot in your code view window which also can be a time saver.
One of the disadvantages of the WYSIWYG editors is the majority of them on the market currently use tables for positioning of non tabular data. That practice is old school and is no longer accepted by the international standards posted by the W3C. While Dreamweaver will create css for many of the things you would use css for it will only create it as inline CSS you will still have to go back later and migrate all the inline CSS to an external CSS file and post it on your server as well as a link to it from within the header of your web page.
Dreamweaver and many of the other WYSIWYG editors also support writing languages other then HTML. They may not support displaying the pages as you may be writing a page in a server side scripting language which will only work after it has been interpreted on a compatible web server.
There are editors on the market that specialize in writing code in particular languages like php for example. One of those I am becoming familiar with is the Zend Studio. Within that program you can actually run php scripts and see what the output on a browser would be at the same time.
Overall the write editor for a person comes down to which editor are they most comfortable with that is capable of doing the job they want to do in the most proficient way. Everyone out here has a different skill level as well as different needs with the tools they choose.
Topics: Web Standards Questions, Web Design and Development | 2 Comments »