Which HTML WYSIWYG tool do you recommend?

Question

Why?

Which of Microsoft Expression Suite is recommended for developing a web application (no silverlight or WPF support needed).

Which all products available today in the market are standard compliant?

Answer 1

None.

Real men handcode HTML, even the best WYSIWYG tool is lousy at generating HTML.

Answer 2

I don't know if things changed recently, as I'm not a big web developer, but WYSIWYG editors at one time produced HTML that was both invalid and just plain bad. Unless things have changed and they can not produce correct and perhaps even valid HTML, I would recommend avoiding them.

Answer 3

There's nothing good that I know of. You just have to hand-code it.

(rant - This, to me, is the clearest indicator of the failure of CSS. If it's impossible to create an application that can correctly handle WYSIWYG layout, then the underlying technology is lacking. Too bad it's too late to change it now.)

Answer 4

I also second that it is usually best to hand-code.

There is a now discontinued open-source editor called Nvu that is at least o.k. as a support for hand-coding (there seem to be successors called KompoZer and Composer)

Answer 5

Not sure this is an answer, because I hand code everything as well, but the answers here are interesting. I recently was chastised by a graphic designer/web developer person because I did not use Dreamweaver or GoLive.

Cleaner code can definitely be created by hand editing. I use Vim. But I'm sure if you asked any of the artistic designers our there, Dreamweaver would have a huge majority.

Answer 6

Zeldman recently linked to a new solution. I think it still requires Dreamweaver, but if Zeldman's endorsing it, the standards support is likely quite good.

Answer 7

Depends if you are a designer or developer and really how much you want to spend:

• Microsoft Expression Web
• Microsoft Expression Design

Are good for the basics but they do cost money, however if you just want a good HTML web designer, that is FREE

• Visual Studio Express Web

Uses the same core layout engine as Expression Web. If money is no object

• Microsoft Expression Studio
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition

Are both good. But if you are a designer type go with the Expression tools, if you are a developer, go with the Visual Studio tools. Both come from the same Visual Studio framework, to make the work interoperable between designers and developers.

Also to answer your other question, about which are popular in todays market, they are the following:

1. Adobe Dreamweaver
2. Microsoft Expression
3. Eclipse (and it's many siblings)
4. Microsoft Visual Studio

Answer 8

looking-for-wysiwyg-html-editor has some interesting looking stuff.

Answer 9

The answer is (as others have said) "real men handcode HTML", but not because of some ill guided pride, but because:

1. You shouldn't design in your editor (at least not right from the start). Design should be done using an other media (whiteboard, paper, etc). Sitting in front of a monitor really decreases your creativity
2. If you have something clear in mind, you will spend more time clicking around than you would have writing the code by hand
3. No editor will help you debug your code (if it doesn't work correctly with a given browser for example), automatically generated code can be (very) hard to understand.

Answer 10

It is best practice to hand-code, as others have suggested. It is impossible to have a truly WYSIWYG editor for the web because you cannot truly guarantee the what you see is what your users will get.

The WYSIWYG editor is going against the grain of the very nature of the web.

Once you accept this and work with it you can start to focus on other important factors such as making sure users can access your content (accessibility); making sure your brand is communicated across a number of different devices and contexts, despite not being able to completely guarantee the look of your site; and making sure your content, copy and semantics are as good as they can possibly be. For these you really need to hand-code, which, when aided by a good HTML/CSS editor, is easy to learn and practice.

Answer 11

Nvu and Kompozer are ok, but quite buggy (crashes, typed text appears in the wrong tab etc).

Avoid NetObjects Fusion at all costs (I wish I had).

Answer 12

I had an awful experience trying to make a CSS compliant web-site using Dreamweaver. I tried using the 'design' view as well editing the 'code' view. Either way, nothing (other than the most basic pages) I created would render correctly across Firefox, Safari and IE.

I ended up just hand-coding, and it mostly just worked fine.

I tend to use iWeb for quick and dirty non-important sites, and hand-code the HTML for other projects.

I think Dreamweaver used to be good a long time ago, but now its bloated/cumbersome like Word.

Answer 13

Why hand-code, from Wikipedia:

Difficulties in achieving WYSIWYG