Show Me The HTML
Posted 06/11/2008 at 9:22am
| by Scott Rose

Mozilla’s SeaMonkey suite contains Composer, which gives you WYSIWYG drag-and-drop webpage creation, as well as full access to the underlying HTML code.
I’ve been looking for a very simple HTML editor that’s WYSIWYG, but will also allow me access to the backend HTML code in order to make minor tweaks and additions. I’ve used iWeb, but it doesn’t give me access to the HTML code. Any recommendations?
The good ol’ days of very simple WYSIWYG HTML editors that give you access to the underlying HTML code are almost over. But Mozilla’s SeaMonkey (free, www.seamonkey-project.org) contains a very simple HTML editor called Composer that will remind you of Claris Home Page and Adobe PageMill. It does exactly what you’re looking for, and even has an interface that looks like it was transported straight from the Mac OS 9 days. High-end HTML editors, such as Dreamweaver CS3 ($399, www.adobe.com), will give you all the flexibility that you’re looking for plus many more powerful options, but they are admittedly trickier to master.
Overall, the trend these days in WYSIWYG editors is to give you more of a desktop publishing experience while the app takes care of generating the HTML code invisibly in the background. iWeb (part of iLife, $79, www.apple.com), Goldfish ($39, www.fishbeam.com), Freeway Express ($79, www.softpress.com), and RapidWeaver ($49, www.realmacsoftware.com) give you drag-and-drop ease and let you manually add your own HTML snippets to a portion of a page, but they still restrict you from editing the entire page’s HTML code.