How to Choose an HTML Editor To Suit You

Author: Ian McAllister

In theory you don't need a special HTML editor, you can just use any text editor. That's fine if you like doing totally unnecessary work.

At the other extreme you have "what you see is what you get (wysiwyg)" editors that allow you to type into the editor just like using Word, and the editor produces your HTML code without you ever having to do any coding. That sounds perfect - doesn't it?

It means that you don't learn HTML, so you are at the mercy of the program. You can't help it when it fails.
WYSIWYG programs put concealed advertising into each page, because they know that you can't check their work.
Microsoft puts deliberate errors into the code so that the pages won't work when viewed with competitors' browsers. You lose a lot of visitors that way.
The code is horribly clumsy, as you would expect from a computer trying to do artistic designs.

I prefer something in between the two extremes. It puts code in for you at the click of a button, but only where you specify it. In other words, you don't have to type in long instructions all the time, you just tell the computer where you want which type of instruction and it puts it where you specify.

I always use the freeware html editor called Arachnophilia, and if you have joined my free membership group you can watch a video demonstrating the most important parts of how to use the program.

By all means use a free wysiwyg html editor if you don't want to learn html, but you will keep running into problems that you can't solve without understanding the code.