Re: Pros and Cons of HTML tools

[Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- jci -dot- com]

Until FP2000, Front Page was something best left at the bottom of the
toilet bowl. (I was going to quote from my FP97 certificate, but I can't
seem to find it at the moment. When we first started using it here, they
sent a batch of us to school on it.) I tried it for a while, then quit and
went back to hand coding the pages. Oddly, enough, it was *faster* to do it
that way than use FP97. Go figure.

Now, the list of gripes I have with FP is similar to the list of gripes I
have with *all* WYSIWYG HTML editors. I still have yet to see anyone build
a page of any degree of complexity with one of those tools that actually
contains completely valid HTML (as opposed to HTML that will work in a
browser, the two concepts *are* different). I passed an FP2002 developed
page through the validator and got 6 errors, which means it's probably no
worse than the other tools. MS has certainly come a long way from the first
version. Among the web professionals I know, FP is still considered a
hallmark of amateurism, but I suspect that it's more because of the baggage
of the past versions than it is a comment on the current one.

Does FP2002 still mangle imagemaps? (That was one of the major gripes with
the old one; when you opened an imagemap it rewrote the imagemap to the
point the original editing app couldn't recognize it anymore.) That isn't a
problem for me, because I rarely use them, but it might be for someone
else.

Best tool? BBEdit, of course. ;{>}

Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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