Web Page WYSIWYG Editors

No discussion of web editing would be complete without discussion the tools I use to create them. I really wanted a WYSIWYG (that's What You See Is What You Get) editor. There are many for HTML, but I wanted one for PHP and CSS editing as well.

For HTML, my favourite has always been Arachnophilia. I've been using it for so many years, there have been many versions of it published since I started. I tend to stay with an older version because it let's you preview your page with any web browser you want. It has an internal browser, and a powerful replace all that let's you replace one string with another in all open pages if you want to. The newer versions are written in Java, which works on any platform. I'm sticking with the 4.0 version myself, which only works on Windows. Suits my purposes just fine. Get it here at http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index_old.html

My rating: 4 stars out of 5!

For CSS, my hands down favourite is Eclipse Style. This is a very powerful editor that not only takes the guesswork out of CSS, it gives you a preview of what your style will look like, and with each attribute that is changed, the view changes too. Save it and you have your CSS elements arranged in alphabetical sequence, with all punctuation and spacing automatically done. Get it at http://www.greeneclipse.com

My rating: 4.5 stars out of 5!

Finding a PHP editor was much harder, well, a free one that is. When I finally did find one, I was pleasantly surprised to find one that had WYSIWYG. Because PHP resolves at the server, it comes bundled with an internal PHP server that you must install to be able to preview the code, if you don't happen to have one installed on your PC (most people don't). I'm not sure where the code was built, but during the install, you can select your language. I of course, selected English. About the only complaint I have about this software, is that the tool tips, and some of the components of the software are in another language - could be Spanish or Portuguese. A minor annoyance considering what else the program can do, and it wasn't enough to make it unusable. Support for hot-keys is limited to a only a few functions and is not customizable. Still pretty good though. You can get it at http://www.brothersoft.com/php-editor-download-36654.html

My rating: 3.5 stars out of 5!