Poll: What is the most important feature in a Web/HTML editor?
Thursday October 4, 2007
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I've got HTML editors on the brain right now. I spent the weekend evaluating 124 different Web editors, and I found myself actually dreaming about them last night (which is pretty weird, let me tell you). One of the things I did was evaluate the editors on 30 different features. There are some features that I find vital to a high-quality HTML editor, but I'm curious what you think. These are the 9 most important features to me, which is most important to you? Or if there's a feature that you value even higher than the ones listed, what is it?
What is the most important feature in a Web/HTML editor? Remember, you can only vote once, so please read all the choices before you click one.
Comments
It’s not fair! I wanted to vote for at least three items. I expect valid HTML code but I love the extras that help creating and maintaining a site. WYSIWYG + Text views, Tag completion, FTP Upload, templates, etc. What I would really love is a design tool that would let me edit/view in an active mode, i.e. running all the Javascript, PHP, etc. content glue. Sometimes I get frustrated having to upload to a test location, browse with 4 different browsers, note any problems, go back to editor… It really slows down the design process.
Depends on whether or not you hand code your pages. Dreamweaver is great, but I barely fire it up. Haven’t in years, even though we keep upgrading to the latest version. Since I write code by hand the stuff I like is tag completion, syntax highlighting, extended search and replace functions and multiple file editing.
And since I have been doing this stuff for years, I have a huge code library to draw from for the tricky stuff. That helps…
So, visually create your pages or hand code?
The first comment above sums it up for me, but I would go further and say that accurate rendering in the latest browser formats, would go a long way to assuring that most folks would see my pages the same way. Internal validation is great though.
I forgot to mention that templates and WWYSIWYG created pages share one characteristic I abhor - namely bloated code.
Strange results so far, I think. I had to vote for text edit because if you can’t edit text easily nothing else really matters. Why validation is so high really surprises me since external validation is so quick and easy that to me it seems hardly a concern internally. Easily getting help to insert less familiar structure/values is what I really appreciate.
James: I guess you’ve never worked on a site that is behind a corporate firewall and can’t be viewed by the online validators. I have also worked on sites on places like airplanes - where you don’t have access to online validators.
Plus, it’s just faster if you can hit a button and get a reliable validation right on your computer, without having to upload, surf to the site, submit it for validation, and then wait for the results.
That’s why I find an internal HTML validator to be critical.
code collapse. The single best thing ever. Used in Firebug, DW and others. This feature lets you ‘collapse’ everything a tag contains. Great for complex sites and messy sites (tables).
Almost all of the above. Which Dreamweaver embodies IMO.
However, for a validator I use W3C, and for FTP Mozilla FireFTP, as Firefox is my preferred browser.
I too find validators critical.
Not only because I’m required by state law to validate, but also because a validator picks up coding errors I didn’t even realize were there.
Very educational.
I use HTML-Kit for most of My sites. One of the major reasons I use it is that I can set up the FTP and edit the files directly. It is nice to just save the file and jump to a browser to see how it works. Many times I will open IS, FireFox and Opera to the page I am working on and just refresh to view changes.
I find it surprising that CSS support is mentioned. I couldn’t live without the CSS intellisense feature in Dreamweaver.