Browser-based editing and CSS
Not sure how I missed this but on Sunday Dave noted Kevin Altis’ question: “What are examples of WYSIWYG products that do CSS right?” If you mean WYSIWYG products—such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, and FrontPage—I only have experience with Dreamweaver 4, which does a reasonable job of formatting text with CSS but doesn’t handle the positional CSS that is used to lay out this site. I’m hoping that version 5 will do a better job because I’ve enjoyed using Dreamweaver since version 1.
The CSS tool that I currently use is Bradbury’s TopStyle Pro. Anyone familiar with Macromedia (formerly Allaire) HomeSite will be immediate comfortable with TopStyle Pro—Nick Bradbury created both editors. TopStyle Pro utilizes a browser engine (either Internet Explorer or Netscape Gecko) to allow you to preview changes in the style sheet as they apply to a chosen HTML document.
Kevin also writes:
Forget about tables for a moment. If Radio is really going to push CSS, the place it has to be done is in this WYSIWYG editor. Is that possible? Can the UI still keep the notion of the styles, but support CSS behind-the-scenes? I would hope so, but I don’t know how the mapping would be done except for more abstract entities like <H1>, <H2>, ordered lists, etc. that are more semantic. This is the fundamental problem that other WYSIWYG editors also have to solve.
To my knowledge, this problem has been solved by Ektron’s eWebEditPro. In his Radio UserLand 8 review, John Udell describes the “Microsoft DHTML edit control, exploited by Radio and other web-writing systems, [as] a flawed solution in several ways” but refers to eWebEditPro as “an industrial-strength and Netscape-capable implementation of the edit control.”
I remember thinking at the time I read John’s review that it would be neat if UserLand licensed eWebEditPro (perhaps for a slightly more expensive Radio UserLand Pro). Ektron already license eWebEditPro to a number of CMS vendors. [Disclosure: I do some consulting work for FirmwareDesign, who distribute both Macromedia and Ektron products in Australia.]
