For those users, who do not wish to spend hundreds of dollars on pricey HTML editors, we have compiled a list of 5 of the most efficient and user friendly HTML editors, to make your editing work a lot easier.
‘First Page’ is a free HTML editor and is available for Microsoft Windows platform. According to its creator Evrsoft, it is a HTML editor that would not hamper your codes. It has a list of predefined templates to create new HTML or CSS files. However, these templates aren’t design oriented and are just document type templates. The environment of the editor defaults to a split screen code view with a left-column panel for browsing files that can be toggled on and off.
Code syntax highlighting is available for Perl, CSS, HTML, CF, ASP, and SSI. But, it is quite inefficient when it comes to rendering PHP pages. It has everything you would expect to see in a professional editor including quick browser preview, rollover images, special character list, spell-check and thesaurus lookup, visual color picker, and a style-sheet link-up wizard. First Page also has a built-in library of JavaScript modules that’s pretty extensive (450+ scripts); and its “Tidy HTML” tool actually does a decent job cleaning up HTML and converting it to XHTML.
‘Kompozer’ is a free HTML editor and is available for Microsoft Windows, MAC & Linux platforms. It is entirely based Geko, the engine that has been accredited behind Mozilla’s development. The editor window in composer has tabs for WYSIWYG-view, hierarchal HTML tag view, code-view, and live preview. There is no split-screen mode for those of you who like to see the code and the visual at once, so that can be a little uncomfortable. The tools include basic text formatting, image insert, etc.
It also automatically parses your CSS files and puts your class selectors in a drop-down list so you can easily apply styles to your html. Kompozer has an HTML tidy feature that compresses your HTML files and converts HTML to XHTML, and a visual color picker. It works fairly well with Mac OSX.
‘Amaya’ is a free HTML editor and is available for Microsoft Windows, MAC & Unix platforms and is an open source project from W3C. According to W3C, Amaya is intended to provide a framework that can integrate as many W3C technologies as possible. It takes a different approach to HTML editing by combining the editor with a web browser. However, Amaya turns out to be quite inadequate as far as editor and browser combination is concerned.
It almost never renders pages correctly. It’s difficult to switch between code and preview mode unless you know the shortcut keys. The code text defaults to a what appears to be about a 9px size—almost unreadable. And the tools are all congested into a right-hand expandable menu.
The CSS Toolbox is a standalone Windows based CSS tool that has enhanced CSS editing capability and is far better than the rest of the HTML/CSS combined editors. The syntax highlighting is quite impressive and a tabbed panel in the right-hand column gives all kinds of options for managing and editing selectors and CSS properties without even touching the code.
It also boasts a powerful set of CSS validator, reformatters, and syntax checkers. Free CSS toolbox can also be upgraded to Rapid CSS Editor which includes a full HTML/XHTML editor.
‘NoteTab Pro’ is a free HTML editor and is available for Microsoft Windows platform. Its feature set is large but the interface is lacking and there’s no WYSIWYG view. An awkward and unwieldy row of buttons at the bottom of the NoteTab window gives you access to a long list of features which pop up in the left-hand column.
The individual features are listed in a bland bulleted list that’s difficult to navigate. However, NoteTab Pro does well with the essentials. Syntax highlighting is good and it even has a decent FTP program.
