Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver? 300
An anonymous reader writes "I've been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver, and haven't stumbled upon anything that works the way I need. Aptana and Bluefish are fantastic tools, but I cannot work exclusively with them, since Bluefish doesn't have that WYSIWYG functionality that is so important when you're also dealing with design, and Aptana doesn't have classic ASP support. I don't care much about the classic ASP support, but, even though I'm a PHP developer, I give support to classic ASP code on a daily basis. What open source tools are you guys working with out there? I'm really not looking for a Dreamweaver clone, just a tool that gets closer to cover my needs: WYSIWYG, PHP, HTML, CSS support, and less important, classic ASP support."
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:4, Insightful)
WYSIWYG is not professional for many programming tasks, but for designers, unless you are in the scientific community, and sometimes even then, WYSIWYG is pretty much the professional standard. You'd probably have better traction saying OSS isn't professional (which might have worked 10 years ago... but isn't so true now).
No such animal? (Score:4, Insightful)
It has been years since I checked, but I don't think there is such an animals.
Last time I asked I got pointed to html/text editors and got a pious sermon about how I didn't really need a WYSIWYG editor.
I didn't, but when the web designer for my company showed me what his work was like I was convinced that he could use a text/HTML editor, but it would take him 5 times as long to do his job.
That is the problem with the OSS community....developers working without a layer of people who are willing to listen to users to find out what they need instead of arrogantly telling them what they will find useful.
Any editor + firebug (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm on the server side of web development, but HTML/CSS gurus I work with mostly use Firebug for all their WYSIWYG needs. They need to test in plethora of browsers and produce high-quality code, so relying on any individual IDE for visual design would be impossible.
That being said, maybe take a look at Komodo Edit (choice of many HTML/CSS coders I know), or figure out how zen coding works by trying it with one of the supported editors here [google.com].
P.S. What I am trying to say: if you are serious about your work, you don't need WYSIWYG. Even if you are a hobbyist, you don't need it.
Try DreamWeaver (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
WYSIWYG editors are wildly helpful when it comes to saving time and opportunities to typo your code. If you can put together an error-free 7x9 table in Notepad++ in five seconds, get off Slashdot and get back to your hyperproductive life. (Also, I call BS.) If time and accuracy are no object, it's a hobby or you're learning. In those cases, by all means, use a straight up text editor, because you're writing web pages for the joy of doing it, or you need to do it more to practice and get better at it.
For the rest of us, who do this sort of thing for a living, or as a time-sensitive project, we need pages coded quickly and accurately, which is why we (convince our employers to) pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for products like Dreamweaver. The split view in Dreamweaver is really useful for doing tricky layouts. Let the program do the heavy lifting by dropping in whatever blocks/tables/whatever that you need, tweak the code as necessary to get the desired result, push the changes up to pre-production, and get on to the next thing that needs to be done ALL WITHOUT SWITCHING WINDOWS. It doesn't leave out tags, it doesn't typo parameters, it doesn't forget the name of that one variable you need to change to get what you're looking for.
If you're shunning tools to make you more productive in the name of intellectual purity, you're just being difficult and spiteful to yourself, your boss, your employer, your client, or any number of other stakeholders, people who need to see the work done for a reason other than to demonstrate you can do it.
tl;dr: No.
Re:No such animal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't imagine how you could keep your code to any real standard and keep it readable while using WYSIWYG product. On top of that, modern websites use javascript and dynamic content all of which those editors just don't handle.
A better solution is a nice theme and a nice CMS system.
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everyone has the luxury of a large, diversified staff. Some people have to wear a lot of different hats.
Re:No such animal? (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't, but when the web designer for my company showed me what his work was like I was convinced that he could use a text/HTML editor, but it would take him 5 times as long to do his job.
That is the problem with the OSS community....developers working without a layer of people who are willing to listen to users to find out what they need instead of arrogantly telling them what they will find useful.
Most web designers don't go near HTML/CSS. The workflow is that usually designers produce their work in Photoshop. CSS folks then produce (X)HTML/CSS templates which are later implemented into the web application / CMS. Even those designers who do both usually don't actually design in their browser.
Re:No such animal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditionally, people wrote free software that they themselves found useful. A developer would decide he or she does not like any existing html editors, so they would write a new one. They would release it as free software, since they were not interested in marketing it, and getting feedback and code contributions from users was more valuable for them than getting money for the product. That's how what you call OSS community works. If a developer is telling you "you don't need a wysiwyg editor", what they are really saying is "I don't need a wysiwyg editor, I believe you don't either, but if you think otherwise, go and write one." They are not being arrogant, they are trying to be helpful. You are the arrogant one, for thinking everybody has to write the software you find useful, and give it to you for free.
WYSIWYG (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a good text editor or PHP IDE and use tools like Chrome DOM Inspector or Firebug for Firefox to tweak your CSS and view its results in real-time.
Question: why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been looking for an open source alternative to Dreamweaver, and haven't stumbled upon anything that works the way I need.
You've given a couple of criteria, but the question that I think needs to be asked/answered is why are you looking for an alternative? Is it for ideological reasons, or are you hoping for a cheaper product, or does Dreamweaver not measure up somehow, or...? Knowing the answer to that question could take the discussion on a different path.
This question crops up a lot on Slashdot ("I want an open source alternative to ...") and it always generates some interesting discussions, along with mentions of products that may be new to people, and that's good. But it often seems (or is blindingly obvious) that the questioner is really just looking for an open source product "because I want to support open source". And that's fine as far as it goes, but at some point you have to go with "the best tool for the job is abc".
Depending on your context, "best" may change. For some people, the most important criterion is it's affordable. Open source sometimes meets that requirement better than closed source. But just realize that if you go for open source software just because it's open source, you may get something that's inferior in terms of feature set, ease of use, or other measures. If it's for personal use, and you're okay with that, dandy. If it's for business use, however, and you're trying to proselytize, this may not be the way to do it.
To each their own.
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:2, Insightful)
I consider myself a professional web-designer, and when it comes to HTML/CSS/JS/PHP, I haven't touched a WYSIWYG editor in aaages. The only thing I use a WYSIWYG application for is for the initial mock-up of a design (in Inkscape or Illustrator etc), after that I craft a clean and semantic HTML page (in vim, but obviously any text-editor works for that), then I start styling, adding extra DIVs along the way if needed. Then I start moving the HTML over into templates and move on to the server-side bits.
I find that writing the HTML is very trivial and a WYSIWYG editor just gets in the way of producing clean and semantically correct HTML, and I'd be surprised if using that for authoring fully featured websites is actually a 'professional standard' these days.
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
You understand that not everyone has the same goals and requirements that you have?
As a piano player, I always felt that the ukulele was a terribly limited instrument. The range too small, only four notes at a time, not a lot of projection. Until I played the ukulele and realized that an entirely different level of expression was possible with an instrument where you could manipulate the sound-creating elements directly with your fingers. But of course, neither a ukulele or a piano is a chromatic harmonica or a hammer dulcimer.
Just because you value certain attributes of a tool for creating a web page doesn't mean everyone does.
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
The guy asked a simple question, and as usual he is told, "No, you mustn't want what you want, you must want what WE want!"
So, let me repeat the question: What's the best open source replacement for Dreamweaver? Points off if your answer is a text editor.
It's already been said (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No such animal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now now, if all you are doing is static HTML for some Mom and Pop store, your point *might* be valid. But websites done for money nowadays rarely are straight HTML. All have some CMS on the server, mostly PHP or JSP, and there no WYSISYG software dares to tread. Dreamweaver is hopeless when trying to make a Drupal theme or modify a Magento web shop.
If WYSIWYG has a place, it's in letting designers crank out prototypes. One man shops are better off investing in something like Coda for Mac OS X (I know, it's not open source, but it has served me well) or Eclipse or BBEdit. That, and complex tables really should be avoided unless you are presenting an actual table. CSS layout is what matters. Relying on a WYSIWYG editor will leave your site looking clunky and bloated.
As for your assertion that no one looks at the underyling code? I do, all the time. Especially when debugging/refactoring my own. ;)
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely true .... I've never used a WYSIWYG HTML editor before that didn't make a mess of the original code. BUT, until the day comes along where someone's able to build one that produces only clean code? It's the nature of the beast.
IMO, web sites really take two basic forms (with a lot of "gray area" in-between in some cases). Either you're essentially building a web APPLICATION ... a relatively interactive site that does data lookups from a back-end database, and/or interfaces with other Internet sites to pull and filter content for re-display, OR you're building a more static site intended to serve as a business's "shingle on the net", or photo gallery, or ?? The folks doing the later are usually far better served with apps along the lines of Dreamweaver (or on the Mac side, I prefer such tools as Rapidweaver with 3rd. party plug-ins and extensions). A full grasp of HTML code isn't even really necessary to do a good job with sites of this sort. Much more critical is a good sense of style and design, while hanging onto the concept that part of that impression the site makes on viewers involves loading time, as well.
The coders like to call these more static, design-oriented sites "less professional" because they clearly weren't hand-coded, and the HTML source is typically a big mess. But quite frankly, they're also the sites I see that are usually the most visually appealing and when done properly, have the most efficiently organized layouts of their content too.
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. To put things in perspective a little bit:
I design and print artwork for a living. I *could* create all my vector prints using Postscript, and all my raster images using a hex editor and encapsulating the image data between Postscript tags prior to print. In fact, I could then rasterize these files for print by cross referencing all of the color data required on a pixel by pixel basis, then converting this pixel data into the bit format (including header data and possibly frame order) of the inkjet I want to use. Oh, and then I could send the data to the printer, bit after bit after bit, making sure I close the data connection so I can ready for the next job.
I actually do have the knowledge to do all of those things, and for the most part I could provide pretty good results, once I was done debugging and manipulating the data. But it would take hours or days to complete a single job. By using tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, a RIP, ICC profiles, a proper printer driver, etc) that automate all the boring, repeatable, and tedious stuff, I'm far, FAR more productive. Sure, there's no way in hell I could edit an .eps from Illustrator by hand due to all of the extra crap in the file, or modify a data stream on the fly, but it "just works".
I don't think it's unfair for web developers to want to find tools that automate their workflow. The arguments about "bloat" or "30 seconds to load the page" or "can't edit the code" aren't complaints about WYSIWYG in general; those complaints are about shitty WYSIWYG applications. Lean on the companies companies that make these programs instead of leaning on the folks that want to use them, because automation is badass and here to stay.
Re:notepad++ dude. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. I don't want to think of it like writing source code. I want to think of it like placing objects on a blank page. I want to be able to manipulate the elements directly, and think of shapes and locations and colors as shapes and locations and colors, not hex code.
The trouble is, you still wind up with HTML and CSS, except that it won't render well on but half the screens and browsers, you will have no idea how screwed it is on any screen you haven't tried it on. You want to place objects on a blank page. What's the aspect ratio of your blank page? What's the orientation of your blank page? How big is your blank page? Is your blank page a six foot wide mural, or a phone screen? Design for one and it will suck on the other. Design for portrait and it will suck in landscape. That's why HTML is a markup language; no two screens are going to render the same, and the more you try to force it, the worse it will render.
These tools all produce crappy code. How good is your phone at understanding voice commands? Well, that's about how good these tools are at writing code.
Re:No such animal? (Score:5, Insightful)
It really is disappointing that no one has an answer to Dreamweaver though. I've been searching for an alternative for years. Every once in a while I get a wild hair up my ass and go on another hunt and usually come up empty handed. Yes, there are some great tools out there...but they just aren't at the same level. You can't really complain though because like the other guy said...OSS developers are making the tools that they want to use. Not what you want to use.
I will say though that I'm getting tired of the snobbishness in this topic. There are uses for these editors that don't involve the user being an idiot that doesn't know how to code. I've been doing it almost 14 years and I still use the editors because they make certain things much easier and bring the whole thing together for me. Yes, I could do every single thing by hand, but that would be a waste of time. I'm not getting superior code for making tables and bolding text when I do it by hand. The people that zealously believe that are just being assholes. There are some things that you need to code by hand so that your code is not a giant shit cake, but a surprising amount of this stuff can be done rather efficiently with the GUI in Dreamweaver. It is easier to select a cell class from a drop-down than it is to remember and type in the extra " class='fancytableclass'>" into your code window. It just is. Especially since I usually do the structure of the page first and then style it afterwards.
The editors have their place for a competent web designer but they've gotten a bad name because they are easily used by people that don't know what they are doing to make very very bad looking websites. These editors are a phenomenal tool for someone that is doing coding and designing at the same time. It helps me do these things a lot quicker than I could otherwise. It's not a matter of not knowing how to code...I'm well versed in HTML and CSS...it's a matter of it doing its job well when used by people who know what they are doing.