I’ve tried various editors, both desktop applications and web-based RTEs, but have not found anything that works very well. All too often, they mess up code, adding in ‘tag soup’. Even the ones that claim to only produce valid code often produce a total mess of span tags and style attributes.
Here are some of the features I’m looking for:
- mainly to use as ‘content creation’ rather than creating whole pages or sites (I normally do the design side by hand)
- supports all HTML tags (which includes
<small>,<code>,<kbd>,<dl>etc) - can attach classes to the current element – many editors will insert span tags, causing mess like:
<p><span style='...'>...</span></p> - doesn’t change code that I add (I’ve had editors remove hidden input fields and other stuff)
- doesn’t add deprecated attributes, eg border and cellspadding often get added on images and tables.
- would love it if it could pick up the stylesheet I use for my page and obviously apply the styles I select
- if it’s a desktop app, being Linux-based is gonna be a big plus
Anyone have any recommendations? Here are some of the ones I’ve tried: TinyMCE, FCKeditor and various others on the web; Dreamweaver (briefly), Expression Web and KompoZer on the desktop.
Well, I’m not aware of all the existing WYSIWYG editors around, but have you considered the alternative of using a code editor and create the HTML code by hand? I know it may sound crazy at first hand, but believe me, when you start to feel comfortable with it you’ll become more productive, the code is cleaner and of course, you get more flexibility.
Personally I don’t like dreamweaver, but it’s code editor is very good because of the intellisense that helps you remembering the tags and attributes.