In search of the perfect HTML editor

I gave up using visual wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) web editors some time ago. When you are authoring the content it does somehow help the creative flow to see how your words will look on the web page. But most visual editors I've used leave the underlying HTML looking very untidy, and since I often want to work with the raw code, I find that unacceptable. I've tried cleaning the code up using the excellent HTML Tidy, but while it's great for spotting errors in the code, it tends to interfere with the position of comments that I've placed in the code to assist my block-replacing tool that I use to update menus, footers and so on.

I used Microsoft FrontPage for a long time, for the simple reason that as well as being a pretty faithful wysiwyg editor, it left the raw HTML quite nicely formatted, and could be used as a text editor. But I became aware that the code it created was rather non-standard, and Microsoft stopped supporting it. Once I moved to using CSS it was hopeless. I tried using Microsoft Visual Studio, but its text editor is astonishingly primitive for what is presumably the development environment used by countless programmers.

For a while I got by editing pages in Notepad and previewing then in Firefox. Then a few months ago I discovered PSPad, a fine piece of software developed in a favorite place of mine, the Czech Republic. PSPad is a powerful programmer's editor, though I've only used it for editing web pages. What makes it great are the powerful dialogs for entering HTML tags, which appear to be user-customizable. The program is also extensible with VBScript and JScript plug-ins. However, it seems to lack support for working directly on the server, an issue that will become increasingly important as our business becomes big enough that more than one person is working on the websites.

One of the reasons I've become interested in the idea of moving to Linux is that it has some very good web development tools available. I found Bluefish very impressive, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to open files on the web server. Then I discovered Quanta Plus, a web development tool for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). It's so good that "Quanta Plus for Windows" has become quite a popular search term on Google. Unfortunately for Windows users, it's strictly Linux only.

I was looking around for something similar under Windows and was interested to find a blog posting that was quite enthusiastic about a tool with the odd name of HateML. This looked quite promising (apart from the name) but I quickly found some irritating omissions and shortcomings, like no preview button on the toolbar, an FTP client that only lets you select a single file at a time for uploading, and very limited tag creation templates (no "target" attribute for links, for example.) So for the time being it's back to PSPad.

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