Posted by Marc on 03/31/06 14:44

Michael Trausch wrote:
> Hallvard B wrote:
>>The popularity of Dreamweaver proofs that at least a lot of people like
>>it that way.
>
> Not necessarily. I've used Dreamweaver a lot in the past, but I've
> never used it for WYSIWYG design. When I used it at an old employer, I
> found that I just used the neat features in it that allowed me to see
> browser compatibility problems.

Would you have continued to use Dreamweaver at your employer's if you
had the choice?

> Note, however, that everything that DW gives you, you *can* do by hand.
> And in many cases, when you're working on something that is XHTML
> based, you're not going to want DW to spew that stuff at you, because
> it's going to do it all over the place. That's what the W3C validators
> are for.

Yup. My point exactly.

> To do my work nowadays, I typically use emacs running on Linux or *BSD.
> It's concise, does syntax highlighting, has the ability to integrate
> with source code control systems such as CVS and Subversion, and works
> quite well. You can even use it for things like the Smarty template
> system and CSS and all of that, because there are different modes for
> all of that.
>
> That having been said, some people like vi just as fine for XHTML/PHP
> editing. IIRC, it handles all of the syntax highlighting, too. And
> there are a number of environments for both GNOME and KDE that can help
> you to see things with syntax highlighting in your code.
>
> Personally, I find that syntax highlighting, combined with a little bit
> of common sense, can fix many mistakes that you would potentially
> otherwise make. Of course, it doesn't fix all of them...

Syntax highlighting is the most useful tool a programmer can have, but I
agree with you that it won't fix all problems. I still regularly fall
foul of mistakes like missing the semicolon of the end of a line of PHP.
Textpad doesn't tell me otherwise.

I use Textpad, as I'm not linux-savvy yet, and then use WinSCP to upload
my scripts.

Marc

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