GaryBadger.com: Web Designs by Gary Badger, Sydney Australia.

Everyone has their favourite, and mine is NoteTab Light (freeware). The Notetab website speaks for itself, so I won't bother to re-hash details here. But what I like the most is it's simplicity; it never stops me with a "No, you're not allowed to do that!" type of message, and it saves my code exactly the way that I leave it. I have tried other programs in the past that seemed to know best, by changing the format and code of my files each time I save / close. It also integrates very effectively with HTML Tidy.

Using NoteTab means that I write the raw code (and use a lot of copy / paste!), without using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia DreamWeaver. In my very early days of web development I used a WYSIWYG editor called Homestead Site Builder, but in time and with the assistance of a good book I learnt that I got better results by editing the HTML code directly. Traditionally WYSIWYG editors wrote a lot of crap code [proprietary code that adds no value and doesn't meet web standards], but that's the topic of another rant entitled "Crappy Microsoft HTML".

I have recently tried KompoZer and found it to be a free WYSIWYG editor with a difference. It is an open source project, and the program writes well-formed code to web standards. As the blurb states "Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML." If you're looking for somewhere to start, that's probably a very good place to do so.

The debate: Direct code editing Vs WYSIWYG editing.

In my opinion......