wysiwyg html editor

[xlc123]

Sorry if this is in wrong place.

I need a wysisyg html editor for kubuntu 14.04
I have tried kompozer but it keeps crashing on me.
Are there any others out there?

Thanks

[Goeroeboeroe]

Kompozer is not developed anymore. Even if it doesn't crash, it's too old to be usable.
Kompozer was mainly a bugfix for a program called nvu. They couldn't use the name nvu because of copyright issues.
The company that made the original nvu is now making BlueGriffon. I have never worked with it, but it seems it's a pretty good wyswiyg-editor. Since nvu/Kompozer/BlueGriffon are alle the same family, it's probably comparable with Kompozer, but still maintained.
Warning: this programs is not in the depot, so there's a little risk it could cause problems.
BlueGriffon: http://bluegriffon.org/
Explanation how to install the download from BlueGriffon's side: http://askubuntu.com/questions/30463...ng-bluegriffon
Here you can download a deb-file: http://pkgs.org/download/bluegriffon (easier to install)
There's also SeaMonkey with the built-in editor Composer (on which the original nvu was based), but as far as I know Composer is also really, really old and not compatible with things like html5 and css3:
Here's a page on wikimedia that compares a lot of editors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors

[Simon]

Forgive my ignorance, maybe I am missing out on something. Doesn't Open Office and Libre Office already save pages as html or convert them to webpages?

[Goeroeboeroe]

You can save (or export or something like that) pages as html from within OpenOffice and LibreOffice. That's possible in Word and lots of other programs too. But if you see the resulting html you'll start instantly crying. It's really, really, really horrible. I didn't look at it for some time, so I tried just now to save as html from within LibreOffice. It's even worse then I remembered.
One example:
In html every paragraph is put into a <p>. LibreOffice puts every paragraph nicely in a <p>, that's correct. Except they put in EVERY <p> this inline-css:
<p style="background: transparent; border-top: 1.00pt solid #ff0000; border-bottom: none; border-left: 1.00pt solid #ff0000; border-right: 1.00pt solid #ff0000; padding-top: 0.05cm; padding-bottom: 0cm; padding-left: 0.05cm; padding-right: 0.05cm; widows: 2; orphans: 2; page-break-before: always; page-break-after: auto">
In EVERY <p>. And they put css like that in all elements.
Normally you write this rule just once in an external css-stylesheet. The file I exported as html is 684,7 kB. Exactly the same file in 'real' html and css is 139,8 kB. Five times as big because of unnecessarily css. Most of the things in this inline-css you even not write at all, because for example the background is always transparent, that's standard. You only write it when the background has a color.
If I open the exported html in a browser and compare it with the original LibreOffice-odt, I start crying again. Even with this giant amount of css the original layout is brutally murdered.
And imagine you want to change the padding-bottom. Normally that's changing one value in a css-stylesheet. But here you have to change that in EVERY <p>. This is how it used to be before css came along. Want to change a color? Put it in the html on EVERY place you want to change the color. You had to do this for every change on every place. Sometimes I still wake up screaming when I've had a nightmare about how it used to be.
One funny thing: if I open te exported html again in LibreOffice, it looks pretty good. Except that every jpg- and png-image is replaced with it's binary representation.
So it's still the same mess as it used to be. Frankly I never understood why all these programs give the ability to save as html, because it's really impossible to render this html in a browser in any decent way.

Edit: after looking at some more <p>'s: the inline-css varies, but the rest of the story doesn't change. Except they also use tags like <font>, that are deprecated for over ten years now.

[Simon]

I am not BIG on webpage design, I barely understand the wiki codes. But from what you are telling me is Open Office among others are a "Jack of All Trades" but fails to master the finer points of HTML. I recall thinking how nice it would be to have a wysiwyg offline wiki editor so I could do updates. But you know what I found to be true? You are much better off knowing "exactly" what the codes do behind the curtain.

[Goeroeboeroe]

If you code 'by hand' you know exactly what you do (hmm, more or less...). But the problem with OpenOffice etc. is much bigger then not mastering the finer ponts of html.
They really destroy a layout and with a little bit of bad luck not only the layout, but also real content like text disappears. Besides that it makes downloading very expensive. If you have a data limit, which is the case in a lot of countries for even a permanent connection like cable, or if you're on mobile, your data limit expires fives times faster when sites are fives times bigger than they have to be.
A specialized wysiwyg-editor still makes more sloppy code than handmade, but it's far better as the code OpenOffice, Word, etc. make.

[NickStone]

Quite a few years ago (more than 10 years ago) when I was using Windows 98 I had a very good html editor called 1st Page 2000. Then when I switched to Linux I continued to ise 1st Page in Linux through Wine and worked pretty well (not perfect but it worked). Since then Evrsoft have released 1st Page 2006 which has design view. I believe that 1st Page is still free to download and use. You might want to try this through Wine.

http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage3.shtml

[NickStone]

I've just remembered another HTML wysiwyg editor it's called composer and is part of the Seamonkey internet suite.

www.seamonkey-project.org

[claydoh]

I've just remembered another HTML wysiwyg editor it's called composer and is part of the Seamonkey internet suite.

www.seamonkey-project.org

Yup, the Composer component is the papa to Nvu, Kompozer, etc

[Goeroeboeroe]

Yes, but the papa Composer is really, really, really old. Too old to learn css3, html5, etc. I had a look at it and it's a part of seamonkey that's not been updated.
About FirstPage: the last version is from 2006. Standards in html, css, etc. are changing with lightning speed. A wysiwyg-editor from 2006 is absolutely giving lots and lots of problems with newer browsers like on mobile.
If you want to use a wysiwyg-editor, it's really important you use a recent one. I'm not active on website-forums anymore (except for my own very small), but there were always lots of questions about wysiwyg-editors. not rendering well in every browser. With a good, recent wysiwyg-editor it's (very) hard to find errors in the code. With an outdated one it's simply impossible to help somebody, because it's impossible to understand the code and/or there are too many errors in the code. If you use an old wysisyg-editor and you have a problem and ask for help, you'll very probably get the advice to change editor first.

[claydoh]

wysiwyg html editors almost always suck big time. At least the Nvu, etc, had pretty clean but very basic html. Frontpage, Firstpage, Dreamweaver, etc etc all produce (or at least tend to produce) crappy code (not the results, mind you) that is likely not portable to other platforms.

Still there are a few around for us to try, including Amaya, plus a few online or browser based ones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...YSIWYG_editors
Interesting. Perhaps something is actually useful/

[Goeroeboeroe]

That page on wikipedia points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors for more information (the page I mentioned in my first reply).
Most of the editors on that page are very old and not maintained anymore, or you have to pay for it (and they probably don't run on Linux, like Adobe Dreamweaver).
Amaya is stuck at html4.01 and a partial(!) implementation of css2(!). You really don't do yourself a favor if you use this to build a site.
The original question was for a wysiwyg-editor for html. I don't think it has any use to point to all kind of (very) old editors, that will cause a lot of problems. It really happens a lot: people build a site, it doesn't work well in every browser and the only advice you can give is to start all over again, because the code is too bad to repair.
As far as I know BlueGriffon is the only free wysiwyt-editor still updated, usable for html5/css3 and running on Linux. (Addons are not all free of charge.)
It's far better to code by hand (with help from an editor like Komodo Edit), but that's a different question. Not everybody want to learn html/css/javascript. But IF you use a wysisyg-editor, you should use a good one.

[xlc123]

Thanks, Ill give bluegriffon a go!

[claydoh]

Is html5 a necessity these days, for simpler sites? I am curious on this, though I haven't truly built a website or page in ages. I keep thinking about doing that for mine, but WordPress, etc, are too easy

Of course you need to customize those to make them do what you want and look the easy you want, which just make it obvious that iirc there are no good wysiwyg css editors either, right?

Sent from my Droid DNA using Tapatalk, like that really matters

[Goeroeboeroe]

The problem with every wysiwyg-editor is computers are not too smart. I think. Take something simple like a textcolor. Standard that's black. If I change that color somewhere, every child-element gets the new color too. If I make the color red in a <div>, every <p> inside that div gets red toor.
But maybe there's somewhere a css-rule saying every <p> should be blue. How to be sure that the <p>'s inside that div become red? By putting, to be sure, in EVERY <p> inline-css: color: red; A human being can think and takes care the two rules don't clash. (There are very specific rules about that.)
That's simply the way a wysiwyg-editor works. If it's a really bad one (like LibreOffice/Word), the amount of css is unbelievable. If it's a good one there's some intelligence built in to minimize the amount of css. Some can even export (a lot of) inline-css to an extern file. But every wysisyw-editor makes much too much css.

Wordpress (and some other cms-systems) do a pretty good job. But they all have much too much css/javascript.html. And in every csm I know (but I'm absolutely no expert on cms-systems) it's impossible to correct things by hand, because the code is made by a program. If I change something, the program changes it back. (And most of the time the code is too complicated to change by hand.)
Most of the bigger systems like WordPress are pretty hard trying to keep their code accessible for screenreaders etc. That's something I really like. That used to be different.
At the moment a handcoded site is still far better than anything a wysiwyg-editor can produce. That's to say: if it's good coded. A bad handcoded site can be much worse as what a good wysiwyg-editor produces.

Html5. (And css3, svg, you name it. Html5 is often used as one name for a whole collection of new things. Some of them belong to html5, some don't, like css and svg.). Are they necessarily? It seems people can be really happy without html5. I've heard.
If you make a site with just images, text, links, very static, you can do that with html4.01 etc. But html5 gives a whole lot of new elements that are really very handy. And more accessible, what I think is also very important. For example there's an element especially for site-navigation, and screenreaders can jump right to that element.
(Spiders from search engines work very much like a screenreader, because a spider can't see. If you make a site that's accessible for a screenreader, it's automatically also very good accessible for a spider, so you may get higher place in the searchindex. So if you don't care about accessibility for blind people etc., you can use this more selfish reason to make an accessible site.)

If you use forms that people can fill in, very often you have to check if the values are filled in good. In html5 a lot of that checking is built in, so you don't have to use JavaScript to check if an e-mail-address is valid. (Dependant from what people can fill in a form, you still need to check it on the server too, for security reasons.)
So it depends on what kind of site you make.
The biggest problem with Kompozer and other old editors is not that they don't make html5 etc., but that they have lots of errors in the older versions of html too. And because they are not maintained anymore, that errors keep existing. Browsers used to behave very bad concerning standards, especially Internet Explorer. (Nowadays Internet Explorer is as good as any browser, except they should update it better.) To make all browsers behave well, there were lots of hacks. IE 6 for example had a bug, and you could use that bug to write something only IE 6 understood. Kompozer and other good editors had that kind of hacks often built in.
But sometimes newer browsers had problems with a hack. Since Kompozer etc. are not updated, newer browsers get more and more problems with the code they make.

FrontPage (and other older Microsoft editors and programs) used vml. A language that only worked in Internet Explorer. Other browsers used svg, that's now a standard. Newer versions of Internet Explorer also use svg. Newer browsers and even newer versions of IE can have very, very big problems with vml. Sometimes a whole page simply is invisible. Some not-Microsoft older editors used vml and svg to serve every browser. That used to be okay, but now it causes more and more problems.

So even if you make a simple, static page, I shouldn't use an older editor. And since all new editors can work with html5, css3, etc., you can automatically use that if you use a newer editor. Not every editor can use everything of course, but not every browser knows everything about html5 too.

Hmmm, a bit longer answer as I planned. And it was a short question. Once a politician, always a politician