PageBreeze - Good editor, but uses Trident (Internet Explorer)

PageBreeze

We start off with PageBreeze – a free visual HTML editor that uses the Trident (Internet Explorer) rendering system. PageBreeze offers all of the standard features: text mode syntax highlighting, drag and drop form building and free templates by accessing a third-party website.

The actual process of creating a website is quite easy; as it should be. For this review, we opened up a previously saved version of WebHost Checklist and started hacking away using tools that we actually hadn’t used when creating the site. After previewing our newly saved website (pictured above) we were happy enough with the final output and decided to test the PageBreeze publishing options. In short, it worked like a charm even though our testing server is on the local network. In the second round, we uncovered an issue and were unable to upload our new website to MediaTemple. After closing PageBreeeze completely and reopening our project, publishing worked as intended. All in all, PageBreeze is a great free editor for anyone just starting out on the web.

• Pros:
• Drag and drop form editor, which requires no programming experience.
• Easy to use visual HTML editor.
• Syntax highlighting (big plus for us)

• Cons:
• Uses the outdated Trident engine, which fuels Internet Explorer.
• Issue with publishing to the web, and saving to disk.
• Windows only.

HTML-Kit is a fully featured set of quality HTML editing tools.

HTML-Kit

HTML-Kit lives up to its name by providing a fully featured set of tools that the designers at WebHost Checklist have only found in expensive, premium design packages. Bundled with HTML-Kit are syntax-highlighters for CSS, JavaScript XML and PHP, which become very useful when designing a dynamic website that uses any of the top JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery or MooTools. Also included is HTML Tidy, a free program that restructures your HTML source code into a more compliant document that passes the XHTML tests and renders better in all of the major browsers.

Our first impression of HTML-Kit was the user-interface – it’s lacking some of the visually appealing features that are available in most of today’s apps, but instantly makes it up by displaying the project wizard upon startup. We chose to import our website from the web, and began editing. We immediately found the ‘code-folding’ feature immensely useful, the ability to hide blocks of text that are crucial to the overall project, but not the task at hand brings a nice layer of clarity to the whole process.

Although we couldn’t find information on the rendering engine used in HTML-Kit, we did find that our site rendered extremely well within the editor, and saved into a well-structured file by way of HTML Tidy. Publishing our new site to the test server was a bit of a hassle with no clear way of uploading or choosing a FTP server, but the online support page was useful – you can actually open and edit files directly off the FTP server. This feature alone earns HTML-Kit it’s second spot on our list, beating PageBreeze and leading the way into our number one choice, which is detailed below after the pros and cons for HTML-Kit.

• Pros:
• Tons of editor-extending plugins.
• Includes HTML Tidy.
• Real time syntax highlighters.

• Cons:
• Outdated user-interface makes finding features hard.
• No clear way of publishing site after saving.
• Advertising present in online support site.

KomPozer offers intuitive editing and simple, one-click publishing.

KomPozer (formally NVU)

KomPozer and the outdated, but still great NVU deserve the number one spot on our list for a host of reasons (no pun intended) but before we go further, we need to point out that as of April 2009, NVU is no longer in development, and the current sites promoting NVU are unofficial. Pending the official statement from Mozilla, any sites attempting to collect donations on behalf of the NVU project should be considered shady at best, and an outright scam at worst. Use the Mozilla.org site for contact information regarding donations.

KomPozer has sort of a confusing history: its source code was taken from NVU, which was originally a branch from the old Mozilla Composer program that was bundled with Netscape in the late 90s. Branding aside, the code base always generated clean code that made sites render exactly the same in any Mozilla based browser, and therefore, Netscape Composer and its offspring take the top spot in our list.

The full list of KomPozer features can be found on their website, and the only real thing to say is that the process of designing pages is exactly what it should be: easy to open and create, simple and intuitive editing and one click publishing to the web powered by the FTP site manager.

KomPozer used the Mozilla rendering engine, which means everything you do while editing will render exactly the same in FireFox as it does in the inbuilt preview mode. This is a big plus, in addition to the embedded W3C validate service that ensures your documents are fully compliant with the latest coding standards. The only real down side is the lack of real-time syntax highlighting, but overall the features that are included provide far better an experience in our tests.

• Pros:
• Very simple to use and create well structured web sites.
• Rendering engine is based on the excellent Mozilla code.
• Form builder, CSS editor and tab-based page view.
• Cross platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

• Cons:
• No real time syntax highlighting, which hinders text based editing.
• Interface subpar versus the DreamWeaver GUI.