I’ve been doing web design work since 1995, and one of the things I like best about it is how much it changes fairly regularly. When I started, writing HTML required that I know vi and be able to edit the files directly on the Unix server. Then I started storing files on my local hard drive, editing there in a text editor (Homesite was my poison), and then uploading them to my web server. In the last few years, I’ve started using the WYSIWYG portion of Dreamweaver to handle some of the trickier aspects of design and then using the text editor in Dreamweaver to manage the HTML. And of course, all the change in how I do this is not why I like web design, it’s just a side-note. What I find interesting is how stubborn people can be about their opinions about editors like Dreamweaver. Back in the 1990s when Dreamweaver first came out, the HTML that it created was questionable. Not as questionable as HTML from other WYSIWYG editors (FrontPage was especially bad), but still a lot of bloated code to do things that you could do much more efficiently in the HTML using a text editor. But that was over 10 years ago.  These days, even most of the no-code editors that I’ve tried out do a decent job with the HTML and CSS. It’s rare to see a FONT tag in an HTML document that was edited by a WYSIWYG editor, and tools like WordPress offer easy-to-use WYSIWYG tools (I’m writing this post in the “visual” editor of WordPress, for instance.) built right into the blogging system. So I don’t understand why even in 2012, I can receive comments on my About.com blog like this one (emphasis mine):

I’ve been building web pages for over 15 years now, and one thing I know is that the web is not stable. Things happen that cause problems and the more you can do to protect yourself and your work the better. 

So an exchange I had on a forum I read was very interesting. I asked the question “what offline blog editor do you use?” And this prompted several replies. At first I was pleased, as I was hoping to get suggestions for offline editors. Right now I use MarsEdit, but there are some things about it that I don’t really like, so I was wondering if there were other options out there. 

This is a “podcast” or audio recording where I’m trying out doing an audio recording of my thoughts.

What I notice is that when I was staring at the computer it was very hard to talk, as I kept getting distracted by the machine.

Some things I talk about:

• idea for an article on Webmaster tools and Google analytics
• working on editor reviews and my plan to create a video of my favorite web editors
• thoughts about a new(-ish) category of web editor—the WYSIWYG editor so people don’t need to know HTML at all
  • should I create a separate evaluation of these editors?
  • do customers make a distinction between WYSIWYG editors and “development” editors?