Santa Clause Did Not Come to Felix Salmon This Year

So Felix Salmon needs a visit from the html markup wysiwyg fairy:

felixsalmon.com: — Merry Christmas Bleg: Merry Christmas to you. As for me, all I want for Christmas is...

...a very simple WYSIWYG HTML editor. Why can't I find one?

I spend most of my days writing blog entries.... If I really wanted to, I could hand-code all this stuff in a text editor – well, all of it except the tables, anyway, where a WYSIWYG editor is invaluable. But I'm not the kind of geek who loves to look at code: I'm much happier looking at something which more or less resembles what it is I'm trying to write. Plus hand-coding hyperlinks is always a bore, and I'm perfectly happy to leave it to my HTML editor to remember what all my special characters are in HTML.

Then, once it's written, I want to be able to copy and paste the raw HTML into a web interface in order to publish it. How hard can that be?

I have tried out a few HTML editors. Some, like MarsEdit, are ridiculously bare-bones: they're basically text editors with blog-publishing features. Others are designed for people putting together complicated websites, and are great at creating stylesheets and beautiful pages and whatnot, but are really bad at generating ultrasimple HTML. Others, like KompoZer and GoodPage, also fall short of what I want. SeaMonkey is not even close.... I use ecto quite a lot, and I like it.... But... you can't create a table in it, and it has an incredibly annoying habit of slapping an http:// onto the beginning of anything you put in a hyperlink, even if you don't want one there.

Now there is a program which does everything I want: it's called Dreamweaver, it costs $400, and it also does a gazillion things I don't want. But is there some other app I can use without going down the ridiculously-overspecced Dreamweaver road?

I say that MarsEdit http://marsedit.com/ in Markdown mode http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ hits the sweet spot here...

And surely Conde Nast has a site license for Dreamweaver?

Comments

[David]

Microsoft Word 2007: Save as -> Webpage, filtered

The filtered version has much shorter code, but some office features require it to be saved as a normal webpage. I'm not quite sure what features need it though.

Formatted tables, center (without having to set tables) - even the formula editor work just fine. It saves the formula as an image and puts it in a folder where you save the website.

Even easier for people using one of the major blog sites - publish -> blog takes care of that.

Since I'm on the topic of the formula editor: I wish more people would read up on how to use it. LaTeX is a distance second now, if only because seeing an equation construct as you type it lets you spot typos right away. If you really hate the LaTeX-based code, you can change it to whatever you want: options -> proofing -> AutoCorrect Options -> Math AutoCorrect.

There are a couple screencasts on the MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2006/10/04/Equations-in-Word-2007.aspx

and you can follow from there to Murray Sargent's blog, who goes into much greater detail.

[Retrogrouch]

Brad, the style on your website is so incredibly bad that you have no business giving anyone advice on HTML.

I noticed that your REGULAR font isnow smaller, so that one cannot read even first-indent quotations.

I beseech you to be a decent and humane person: fix the font size on your blog. Make it larger. You will lose readership if you remain so indifferent to the reading experience.

[David]

Retrogrouch: While you wait for this to happen, you could fix it yourself with Firefox 3 Beta 2, available here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
Run it with the Nightly Tester Tools Plugin: http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly
That way your extensions that are not flagged for Beta 2 will work anyway.

It's extremely stable, hasn't crashed once for me and I've used Firefox 3 since beta 1.

With it you can set a slightly higher zoom level once and it will save it for this website. No more eye squeezing on any website.

[vtcodger]

There is an open source HTML editor called Quanta Plus (http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/) which is sometimes asserted to be a Dreamweaver clone. I personally have found it to be more or less unusable. But maybe I just don't understand how to use it. Anyway, in order to use it on a Windows machine you'd probably need to run either a virtual machine, or to boot a Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/) CD. I can't recommend it. Merely mentioning that it is available. It's free.

***I beseech you to be a decent and humane person: fix the font size on your blog. Make it larger. You will lose readership if you remain so indifferent to the reading experience.***

Hmmm. Looks fine on my PC in konqueror (as opposed to Firefox which seems to think that 4 point type for everything should be good enough for the likes of me). May I suggest that it probably looks OK on Prof DeLong's PC also. What might help is for you to view the HTML source. Search for the first line of the offending text and see what HTML markup is used. HTML markup is the garbage inside gt lt <> brackets (Let's see if Typepad can handle those).

======

BTW, the reason for your font issues and the lack of WYSIWYG HTML editors is almost certainly related to the fact that the ML in HTML stands for Markup Language. The idea is that the author specifies content and some layout suggestions and the target PC (the browser) conjures up a display. Despite gluing on a variety of layout related features, HTML simply was never designed to do layout. It's sort of like plowing a field with a sports car. You may get the field plowed, but a machine designed to pull plows (a tractor) will do a better job. Unfortunately, there is no HyperText Layout Language (and there are good technical reasons for that).

Web pages looking different for the site viewers than they do to the author is pretty much the norm although the differences are usually minor.

[supersaurus]

as vtcodger points out above, html was originally designed to specify structure, i.e. "this is a paragraph". the fancy presentation stuff is (best) left to the css, which means a cascade that begins with the browser's default stylesheet and continues through whatever the styles you supply do. unless you take care to neuter the default styles, what the user will see is a hash of what you specified and what the browser filled in when you left it out. of course the user is also free to override all your font choices, whether or not they realize it, and the default stylesheet will fill in many of them (different strokes for different browsers of course). oh, one more thing, the style you want to view on the screen will most likely be different than what you want to see when you print it, e.g. paper is not infinitely long so pagination is an issue, it has a fixed width in inches rather than pixels, and best looking print fonts most likely will be different from screen fonts, etc. in short "wysiwyg" is pretty much a non-starter for html, unless you mean it to apply only to your local file viewed with your own browser.

[DDC]

Take a look at Rapidweaver. Lots of prefabs, versatile, cheap ($49).

[Walt]

David, the people who actually write equations for a living still use Latex. In an equation editor, WYSIWYG is strictly for the amateur.

[Retrogrouch]

David, thanks for the tip. I usually shy away from beta releases, but I may make an exception for this. I usually use safari, but I've been considering making the jump to firefox anyway.

That still does not excuse Brad. Most readers will not go through that kind of effort - they'll just stop reading. His is a voice that should be MORE accessible, not less.

[John Faughnan]

Wow, I could say so much here.

First, there's NOTHING on the Mac platform as good as Windows Live Writer. It doesn't do tables, but it's the current ultimate blogging tool. Reason enough for a serious blogger to install a VM and Windows 2000.

Ecto 3 beta is the closest OS X rival to WLW but in my testing it disappoints. They haven't paid enough attention to the quirks of Blogger and they don't handle tags well enough.

The mid-range HTML wysiwyg software market died over ten years ago. The last good tool I used was FrontPage 98. Those who scoff at it really have no clue. Microsoft later drove the software into the ground, leaving only scattered rubble.

Netscape and the full Mozilla suite used to include a standalone editor, I think they still might. That's probably the only bet for OS X now. I haven't tried the iWorks save as HTML feature -- Apple Works wasn't too bad I think. Office 2008 Mac Word may also be of interest as an HTML editor, I haven't tried using Word 2007 HTML generation, the rest of Word 2007 is so mediocre I don't have much hope. Burned by past experience I suppose.

The 4-6 midrange tools of the mid 90s were replaced by content management systems (of which a blog is a simple example), feeble embedded tools (Firefox's inline editor is terribly buggy, especially when creating a link), and one or two tools aimed at marketing departments.

Sigh. That's progress unfortunately. There just wasn't a paying market for the midrange.

Maybe Safari 3 will do something interesting using Canvas, but I've just about given up on Firefox. That's a platform that seems to have lost its way.

[Neil B.]

I wish I'd gotten here earlier, but a "reasonable approximation" for simple things, is: compose stuff on Outlook Express, including putting in pictures etc, that you copy. Then open and copy the text in the "source" tab to get the equivalent HTML code. It is a decent poor man's version.

tyrannogenius