[sclug] Simple WYSIWYG HTML editor?

[Adam Trickett]

On Monday 03 Mar 2008, Mayuresh Kadu wrote:
> Whether one prefers to edit HTML using WYSIWYG or in the RAW is entirely a
> matter of personal preference ;-) IMHO, one should simply go through the
> tools you come across and use the one that appeals :-)

Weather you prefer to edit in the raw or via a tool is irrelevant in this 
case. The only conditions where using a WYSIWYG tool makes sense if the 
following conditions mostly hold:

1) You never intend to edit the page with anything other than the WYSIWYG tool 
that you have selected - that includes any other WYSIWYG tool.
	a) This also means you never intend to give the pages to anyone
	   else to edit because unless they use the tool it won't work

2) You never intend the page to look right. Though tools like Dreamweaver will 
get you 80-90% of the way to where you want to be they are utterly awful at 
getting through the last 10% to what you consider to be perfection. 
Completing the last 10% has to be done by hand and is much harder if the page 
has been coded by machine first.
	a) You never intend the page to be accessible/cross-platform. Most
	   tools use relatively crude construction techniques that create
	   pages that are hard to make fully accessible or render correctly
	   on all platforms.
	b) Your page will not be optimised for speed, these tools produce
	   very bulky web pages that are sometimes 2 or 3 times larger than
	   they need to be.

They serve a purpose if you want to quickly mock something up. If you use them 
without hand tweaking you have to accept that your pages will probably be 
some or all off:
1) Too big
2) Render tool slowly
3) Look wrong on some/all browsers
4) Probably not be fully accessible/usable
5) Cursed by the person who has to fix them after you

HTML is easy if you want things too look right, then learn how to read/write 
it - it's not actually hard. If you are only making small changes to someone 
else's pages then fancy tool with probably break the pages anyway.

-- 
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment.
    -- Jean Baudrillard
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