wysiwyg web editors

[greenspace]

hi all, i'm curious what folks think about visual site editors. I came to webcraft through mmm.page, which feels more like visual editing, such as google drawings or photoshop than coding, although it does have code blocks where you can add real html. i wish there was a way to do tool plug ins or mod the editor for certain things, but it seems far more dynamic and suited less corpo website slop than most drag and drop editors. how much creativity do you do in html versus visuals for your site? do you use any editor tools? pros/cons compared to raw html?  lets hear!

[sen.fish]

Damn that looks so different from the wysiwyg editors i used when i first started tinkering with html and stuff. I tried to look around for it and apparently the one I used isn't even supported anymore! (I think I might've even been using html4 at the time) This is kinda what they looked like though: https://bestonlinehtmleditor.com/

I think what you shared is closer to Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver, which I never got my hands on since they were enterprise software. The mobile responsiveness is cool, but one of the things that turns me off of site builders like that is how big and clunky they are. I mean the mmm.page front page took 10 seconds to load on my laptop, and I'm still struggling to scroll without it getting super framey. There's so many things going around in the background that I don't think I'd ever want on my own page.

[brisray]

I don'tthink there are many good WYSIWYG editors around anymore, at least for your own computer. I started off using things like FrontPage Express and Netscape Composer and over the years have used SharePoint Designer and lastly Dreamweaver.

Work finally stopped paying for Adobe Creative Suite, so I had to look around for something else. I downloaded some from the list on Wikipedia and a lot of them have not been updated in years - and it shows. I now just use Visual Studio Code.

[Rubbereon]

I usd many of themwhen I was working on my website. 

The 2 of them I remember and credited on my website were Weggo and this https://onlinehtmleditor.dev/ because most of the others I tried weren't that good for what I was trying to do.

It's fine to use a basic text editor for HTML, i mostly used them while working on the website when I was doing simple things.

[xwindows]

I have used both Dreamweaver (the last version that was still under Macromedia name), and Microsoft FrontPage (2002, if I remembered correctly); they were pushed on me by formal education institute (read: high school).

What I found were these programs could work okay for people who need to avoid writing code as much as possible; but user must be aware of their limitations/quirks in order to live with them. Also, both of them had different specializations: if one was aiming to apply visual/graphics design to the web, that would be Dreamweaver's  arena; but if one was writing prose, that would be FrontPage's alley.

However, they both were often jank when I tried to stack/nest up several features onto the same element (especially when there were scripts injected for that feature); and I would need to go "under the hood" to the source to "unjank" or bypass that, which exposed another problem...

The HTML code they generated were running-paragraphs of spaghetti code of so many unneeded tags which made my eyes water as I tried to sift through tags after tags to locate and make head or tail of the thing I needed to fix-- and I could do that at all because I actually already know HTML and some JavaScript at the time. Large majority of my classmates back then who didn't, would resort to wholesale-removing the affected elements (or worse, whole file) and re-create them when they run into such problems.

When a project assignment came at the end of the year, I decided that I had enough so I bit the bullet and had a battle cry of "Screw you, Dreamweaver!" and went to write all the markup, styles, and scripts by hand. The result was superb, the teacher and classmates were very impressed; and I have become a strictly-WSIWYM guy who write HTML and CSS by hand ever since.