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Free/Cheap/Good HTML Editor, Is There Such a Thing?

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For the past few years I've been using Frontpage 2003 for basic HTML work, usually to write content for SQLServerCentral. Let's me use a decent UI for most of the stuff, it it looks wrong I can easily switch and tweak the HTML. Not recommending it for advanced design work, just saying for vanilla HTML it works pretty well and the big advantage is the HTML is clean. I'd rather just use Word, but I've never been able to learn whatever magic is needed to get Word to save plain, ordinary HTML.

Steve Jones recommended EditPlus, but I found it pretty sparse. Just because I know the basic HTML tags doesn't mean I want to type them (reminds me of WordPerfect users). I've tried a few and so far NVU has been the best of the bunch, but still feels not quite right. Visual Studio actually has a very nice HTML editor complete with intellisense for styles, but I don't really want to load VS on my laptop just to use it for an editor! Turns out that even with the bare bones VS IDE that gets installed with SQL 2005 you can use it to create and edit basic HTML, minus the intellisense and it's clunky when it comes to hyperlinking text. I definitely don't need the power of Expression or similar.

Why give up on Frontpage? It doesn't cost me anything, falling within our licenses, just felt like with a new laptop maybe time to stop using a tool with "2003" in it's name, meaning it was written some time prior to that. It's just an exercise, but a frustrating one! Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, or so used to the Frontpage tools I can't get comfortable elsewhere? Fixing Word to save clean HTML seems optimal, anyone figure it out? I'd rather not code it.

 

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