Posted by Runnin' on Empty on 09/12/06 16:56

"David Segall" <david@address.invalid> wrote in message
news:3r8dg2tmsja96nueqsl6ls2e97vqdf5ck8@4ax.com...
> "Runnin' on Empty" <westfork59840@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>"Smed" <gsx1300r_busa@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>news:rZiNg.1484$Y73.212@tornado.rdc-kc.rr.com...
>>> what editors would you recommend?..
>>>
>>> -s
>>
>>
>>Homesite+
>>
>>It comes packaged with Dreamweaver, but it's a separate install.
> If you have already paid for Dreamweaver why do you prefer Homesite?

I (the company I work for, actually) purchases all my products in bundles
and suites, I may only use some of the software once or twice a year, but
when it's needed, we'd better have it.

I do notice that Adobe is selling Homesite+ on it's own for only $99.00,
what a deal, it used to be $600.00.


Why is Homesite better than Dreamweaver?

From a code only standpoint, Dreamweaver blows... macromedia tried to
incorporate some of the better features of Homesite into it for coders, but
it's still too cluttered and awkward to use for my tastes.

Once set up to your coding pref's Homesite is extremely fast for coding
HTML, CFML, PHP, and even ASP (although I don't use it), not so helpful for
CSS.

But that's not an issue, since a style sheet is the smallest part (as far as
volume) of the code.

First of all, the color coding does two things for you, it separates our
markup code from the dynamic code, (in mine HTML is green, CFML is brown and
PHP is gray), make it fast to find blocks of troublesome code.

This also helps if you typo'd a quotation mark, bracket or something, if the
code is not well formed, all the color coding skews, giving you a quick
heads up to start looking for the problem.

Secondly, with auto fill and code hint set to 0 seconds, I don't actually
have to type out entire tags or scripts to complete, for code that you use
all the time, it's a great time saver, to hit the left bracket key, the
first 3 or 4 elements of the tag, and then when you know (from experience)
the code hint selector is on the right block, hit the enter key and
complete.

You still have to know how to code, but once you are familiar with how these
two features works, your fingers can fly, and the code comes spitting out.

You can code a whole page in much less time than without it.

It even has a WYSIWYG side, but I've never used it and wouldn't know how it
compares to Dreamweaver, which I do know is miles ahead of Golive or
Frontpage.

As far as WYSIWYG code goes, I often have to modify code created in WYSIWYG
editors by both good and bad designers.

Dreamweaver is not actually that bad in code generation, but I shudder every
time I have to dig through that ugly, bloated crap that FrontPage or MS Word
creates, it's usually faster to just start over from scratch, which is
probably an intended feature from MS and not a shortcoming (from their
standpoint).

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