Well… it's been awhile since I blogged. Things are going good for the most part… which makes me kinda happy.
For the information of all. I no longer have a Windows-based Desktop computer. The power supply died the other day, abd took the 3 hard drives in the machine with it (RIP 170GB of Data… my poor Music collection… almost 11,000 mp3s).
The Linux machine survived, of course, so I'm using it for everything now. I'm also in the marked for another hard drive… I'll probably get a 200 or 250 GB, and something else to put back in the tower the 3 drives died from. That machine is being upgraded as well… cause I figure it probably took out more than just the hard drives… so I'll put the Syntax board in it, and start building something more powerful.
Furthermore, most of the websites I was maintaining will need to be redesigned, since all of the original layered graphics are gone. I think I'll look into purchasing Pixel32 for Linux, since there isn't a native version of Photo Shop.
Lately I have been getting quite disappointed in some Open Source solutions to problems. Mainly the lack of Rapid Design web development tools.
Face it, if your company doesn't use a CMS, and you have to edit a lot of pages, doing it by hand is just not realistic. That leaves you very little choice but to use a WYSIWYG HTML Editor.
Sure, there are some OK ones out there. Frontpage, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and such. The drawback to these is the price tag, and lack of cross-platform capabilities. (yes, I know GoLive and Dreamweaver work on Windows and Mac OS X)
Sure, there are a few open source, cross-platform editors, such as that built into OpenOffice, Composer, and NVU (KompoZer). There is also soon to be the Quanta Plus VPL Editor when KDE4 is released. (it currently doesn't run on Windows or Mac)
The problem with these tools is that they lack they don't stand up to their commercial competition in any way.
NVU Just plain out Sucks. It's buggy, crash-prone, and can't resist changing code (even scripts) that you type in Code view to another format. Sure, we all know it's because they validate by rendering it, then using the source code as the browser uses it, but it leaves a lot to be desired for editing ability.
I haven't used it in a while, and have heard good things about composer as far as stability and features go. However, I would imagine it has the same code formatting problem as NVU because it's Gecko-based… which leaves it off-limits to me since it would be difficult to integrate the pages with my scripts.
As for the OpenOffice Offering, it just seams weak. Sure, it looks good if you are replacing say… FrontPage Express, Word or the plethora of other free web page editors for web page editing, but there is no serious site management that I can see.
Enter Eclipse…
Eclipse is a tool that is appealing, wonderful, and somewhat of a sore spot all at the same time.
Eclipse has Excellent project management, Tons of great features for code editing and debugging, and the Text-based HTML Editors are second to none.
For PHP, debugging is almost real-time, and from what I can see (not first-hand) Java development, being it's main vice, is awesome. Stylesheet editing is coming along pretty good, and is a pretty good replacement for TopStyle. These things are great, and I use them all for web applications and even building somewhat attractive interfaces. However, it's no to so good when your project contains a bunch of static pages. The Visual HTML Editing just lacks.
I have tried MyEclipse, TruStudio Professional, richedit4html, Web Page Editor and the OpenOffice Integration Plugin so far, and none of them is really what I need.
The closest things to a winner would be the TruStudio Professional editor, and the OpenOffice integration. They both have a good feature set, and are pretty straight forward to use, especially if you don't like digging through menus to do common tasks.
So, here are my thoughts as to what a good visual HTML Editor should do.
First, it should be integrated as an editor in Eclipse. The Project management is a HUGE plus, and the Outline is useful too. (Hint: Expressions Web Designer uses theirs for Tag properties)
Path management similar to FrontPage 2003. I like the ability to select a specific tag from within the Design View, and bring up properties for it, or edit it without going in to code view. It's also useful for stripping out the Crap inserted when someone copies from a Word Document and pastes into Frontpage. (Remove Tag)
The Styles tool bar. This thing is great. I can create a Stylesheet, link it to my page, and my classes and IDs appear in a drop-down list so I can go into a table cell, or click on a tag in the path management, and apply my class to it, or if I created a style for an ID, I can set the ID of the element from a drop-down list.
Scripting… I have a few custom VBA Scripts for doing such things as fixing text capitalization and such, but VBA is seriously overkill for a macro language. Maybe our visual editor should have a language similar to the mIRC scripting language or something along those lines…that just has classes and functions for dealing with elements in the editor, or things you can put in a web page…and make sure there is a Macro Recorder so one could create a macro on-the-fly.
Other than that, I think the standard tool bar would be fine… and something akin to the table tool bar…. probably buttons for form elements, but leave actions and such up to code view.
That's all!
Aside from that, there isn't much else to want in a Visual HTML Editor.
