Favorite free html editor? (how to, work, download, software)

[jco]

I think I've narrowed it to Amaya and KompoZer, but I wanted other opinions before I download one of them. Which of the two would you go with, or shoud I be looking at something else?

[southernlady5464]

Try NVU or even the one that came with your computer...NOTEPAD!!! Look here for lots of goodies, mostly free. Liz

[BrianH]

Notepad! lol

FrontPage 2000 was pretty handy back in the day too.
Dreamweaver man myself now though, have the CS package.

[jco]

I do know some hand coding. Throw rocks at me if you will, but when I first used a WYSIWYG software, I wondered why I bothered with hand coding. Other than control, I don't see the benefit. If I want to change something the interface doesn't allow me to, I just fix it in the coding. Perhaps I'm missing something...

I'm hoping to get Dreamweaver soon, but I'm going to go with a free editor until then. Kompozer is supposed to be bug-free version of NVU, so is that your suggestion?

[southernlady5464]

I do know some hand coding. Throw rocks at me if you will, but when I first used a WYSIWYG software, I wondered why I bothered with hand coding. Other than control, I don't see the benefit. If I want to change something the interface doesn't allow me to, I just fix it in the coding. Perhaps I'm missing something...

Using a WYSIWYG AFTER you know how to hand code is not a problem.

But here's an analogy...

Learning to drive a car. Would you put someone behind a wheel with no knowledge of how to change a tire, check fluid levels, do basic maintenance, etc? Or just send them off hoping they would learn that at some point on the way if and when something when wrong? If you don't show someone who has never seen the underside of the hood of a car where to find the dipstick, they may never find it.

Learning hand coding is much like that. You can rely on powerful editors to do the work for you but you still need to know what is UNDER the hood of your code to know what to fix.

And if you look at the job requirements of web designers, yes 99% need to know Dreamweaver...but almost as many require knowledge of hand coding AS WELL. They want to know their web designers understand WHY the code does what it does and hand coding teaches that.

And a vast majority of wysiwyg editors add extraneous code to the underneath. Frontpage was the absolute WORST offender in that regard. Granted, they made pretty pages but the code underneath was a nightmare. Liz

[jco]

Thanks, southern lady. That makes sense. I know the basics of html, and I'm reading a book that will be teaching me frames and tables, which I don't know yet. To me, it just saves a lot of time to use an html editor. Let's hope hand coding isn't something you lose by not doing it for awhile!

[BrianH]

Agreed with southernlady.

I was the only person in my college to take our webmaster tests in Notepad. And I finished real early too. Its good to know why sommet happens. Or you know when Dreamweaver does sommet quirky, you can manually go in there and fix it.