Good tool that speeds the HTML authoring process

[Francois Masson <Francois_Masson -at- BAAN -dot- COM>]

Bill Swallow asked:

        Web design.  I have refrained from buying an application to
        author in up to now because I felt they all were pretty limited
in
        some regard.  However, now that I am authoring more often and
have
        some sizable sites to maintain, I am sad to say that Notepad is
no
        longer suitable.  Do any of you know of a good tool that speeds
the
        authoring/publishing process along yet still allows for
ASCII-view
tweaking?

I use Macromedia Dreamweaver. It comes bundled with Allaire Homesite
which I used to used, but barely need anymore since Dreamweaver does an
excellent job by itself. One of the best feature of Dreamveaver is that
it does not in any way alter your code when you edit it with the WYSIWIG
editor. You can have the ASCII editor and the WYSIWIG editor side by
side and edit in either one (rather than going from one to the other). I
love using it because it has an interface similar to PageMaker, so you
really feel you are in a page design environment. Another very useful
feature is the library of objects. You create objects (like headers,
logos, tables, and so forth) and you can reuse them again and again just
by drag and drop. If you edit an object in a library, you can propagate
the changes to all the documents using the object.

Drawbacks: I am using it with a Pentium II 200Mhz, with 96 Mb of RAM and
Windows NT 4. The program runs very nicely on my machine. I have heard
from other people running with fewer resources (Pentium 120, with 32 Mb
RAM and Windows 95) that the software was quite slow. The new version,
1.2, seems to be a little bit unstable compared with the previous one,
1.0, which was faultless.

You can dowload a full working demo version at http://www.macromedia.com
And read an article at
http://builder.cnet.com/Authoring/DTools/ss02.html
<http://builder.cnet.com/Authoring/DTools/ss02.html>  where it was
chosen as the editor's choice. There are other HTML authoring tools
compared and reviewed there if you are interested.
        ______________________________________
                                                          
        François Masson
        Tech. Documentation Team Leader                         Chef
d'équipe, Doc. technique
        Baan Supply Chain Solutions                     Baan Solutions
logistiques
        *  418.654.1454 ext. 218                418.654.1454 poste 218
        * Francois_Masson -at- baan -dot- com