Forum Moderators: travelin cat
Your better off using a simple text editor for your coding.
Why? You ask?
Because if you learn how to code by hand you are going to be light years ahead of your "point and click" WYSIWYG editor gang. You are going to be able to ANYTHING that you want on a website.
I also recommend you learn a server side scripting language such as PHP or ASP. Combine that with a database and your hand coding and you have it made.
But of course the Front Page and DreamWeaver crowd are going to disagree. Don't believe them! They are talking without enough experience. Set yourself apart. Become a real programmer and you will understand what I am talking about.
While I believe in hand coding for some situations, WYSIWYG editors can be big time savers in some others.
It all depends on what you do. For the Mac platform, I prefer GoLive over DreamWeaver. Dreamweaver for Mac is quite slow and unstable compared to his Windows cousin.
I agree that BBedit is bar none for hand coding and large batch jobs.
Mozilla has an in-built wysiwyg html-editor, and cascades expands on this with a css-editor.
The reason i don't recommend 1.3 is because of some serious mac-only bugs in installing mozilla-extensions and themes that are awaiting resolution and the eventual release of 1.3.1
I still use GoLive for maintaining sites I built with it... but most "from scratch" designing I do now is almost exclusively BBEdit.
Thank you very much for saying that. I have been procrastinating on buying either DW or GoLive for the Mac. It really helps me make the decision. :)
I tried BBEdit Lite and it is a nice little text editor. Is there anything specific about the full version that you like?
I think it comes down to whatever matches your ability, and what gets the job done. I like GoLive because of group project management features... Real plus!
Cheers,
eboda
One important thing to mention: if you want to keep your code clean and without wasted code garbage, don't save your pages again from within golive. Your code WILL look like frontpage mess. Even with the newest versions of golive the code fragments of changed / added parts of your site will be messed!
After you're finished, your best validator will be the w3c.org official html validator. Golive and any other built in validator just validates your code following its own or modified standard - no true html x.y standard validation! w3c.org is up to date in means of html standards.
BTW: i never use the golive "site" feature. If your site gets so huge that you'll need a tool to organize your page, you'll better use a database solution. There are some really great db tools for the mac that are pretty easy to handle - sometimes even more easy to understand than golive. ;) However, using golive and bbedit it's a easy job to maintain event 200+ page sites without digging around with the confusing site organization feature. Your mac allready organizes a lot for you. ;)