A good Html rendering engine

Question

I am looking for a Html rendering engine that has:

1. Support in a good designer tool that helps me with the syntax, understand my objects (warns me of type errors and non existing names of classes/methods) and validate my Html.

2. A nice readable way of mixing Html markup with common programming syntax, for each, if then

3. Support for sub - templates / functions (in the same file or in another file) which themselves use the same syntax

4. Possibility to use variables the common way, a = 1 ... a = a + b ... if a > c ...

5. Support for larger commonly used class libraries / mature languages (.Net / Java / RoR / Django / Php etc)

6. Produce pure clean markup

I think that's basically it ... Shouldn't be so hard I think, but I haven't found the perfect one yet.

Answer 1

Kompozer

For WYSIWYG and basic html: kompozer.net

Notepad++ <-- I like this one more

For advanced, pure code: http://notepad-plus-plus.org

And both are free :)

Answer 2

You might want to check 'ASP.NET MVC' out.

1. Visual studio 2010 is actually a great web development tool. I am especially happy about the javascript support. I haven't seen better so far in all editors I tried (which are the best known free editors). It supports auto-complete for all languages used. It also warns for Html validation errors. It also has an express edition which is free.
2. You can use pick your server-side language. vb.net or C#. It's up to you to pick what's more readable. Server-side code is wrapped between <% %> tags. In visual studio these tags are also displayed in their own color to make them stand out a bit. Seems like clean separation to me?
3. A templating system is supported with the usercontrols which are placed in separate files with the same syntax. Check it out and see if you like it
4. The standard .NET languages syntaxes are quite common and readable. But that is a personal choice off course.
5. Since you're using .NET you have access to all of it's libraries.
6. You can make your markup as clean as you want it to be, you can have full control over the Html that is produced.

Perhaps you don't like the style of programming or you don't like Microsoft (I know I don't :-)) but they might actually have a winner with this framework, it is very clean. Add to that the powerful Visual Studio 2010 and you are good to go. Besides that, Stackoverflow is written in it.

There are some good videos around to introduce you to the framework. The ones by Scott Hanselmann and Scott Guthrie got me on my feet pretty quick.