Many linux programs can generate HTML pages but its very hard to find an opensource program which can be recommended to create or maintain a website.
Categories of Web Editors
Many of the files required for web editing are just text files with tags embedded in them, such as html, css, javascript and php files. We can therefore use any text editor to produce these files, however most people don't want to learn all the tags and cant always visulise what the page will look like in a browser. Many people would therefore want a wysiwyg editor, but there are occasions where we need to revert back to plain text, for instance: if the html needs tweaking or snippets of script need to be inserted into the page.
We could create the page with a wysiwyg editor (say: OpenOffice.org writer/web) and then customise it with a text editor. The problem is that if we go back and re-edit with OpenOffice.org writer/web and save we will find that it has stomped all over the changes that we made with the text editor. What we really need is a program that can do a two-way switch between wysiwyg and plain text modes.
There is not one ideal solution so I have therefore considered the following options in more detail:
- text editors
- text editor with highlighting
- wysiwyg editors
- combined wysiwyg and raw text
- program editors
- specialised tools
Text Editors
Programs such as:
can edit html, css etc. Some of the more complicated ones like vi and emacs can do syntax highlighting and have other powerful features however learning their specialised keystrokes can be just as hard as learning html tags.
Text Editor with Highlighting
Programs such as:
are one step up from text editors, they are specialised for html and can do things like syntax highlighting of tags, suggesting valid tags, etc.
wysiwyg Editors
There are hundreds of programs that can export to HTML, for ordinary text you could consider:
OpenOffice.org writer/web
This is a variant of writer which saves to html by default.
SeaMonkey Composer
The successor to Netscape also has 'Composer' an html editor.
Combined wysiwyg and raw text
We will consider:
nvu and quanta plus
These applications looked very promising but they were very flaky, I found that they could not cope with larger and more complicated websites, they started to get better and more usable but development seemed to stop around 2006. Kompozer took over from nvu for a while but that seems to have slowed down also.
Dreamweaver 8 with Wine
Dreamweaver is a commercial program designed to run on Windows. However if you have, or can buy, an older version (Dreamweaver 8 is best) it will run on Linux under wine. It you want to do professional web development using Linux this may be the only option. See this page for more information about how I installed Dreamweaver 8 on Linux using Wine.
Program Editors
Some programming IDEs can also edit html, this is especially useful if you require an application such as a database on your website. However for occasional web page editing these IDEs may be a bit intimidating to start with.
If you are using Eclipse then you will need the Web Tools Platform (WTP) plugin which does not come with the openSUSE distribution for example. In order that you get the latest version it may be worth not using Eclipse from openSUSE and instead downloading Eclipse and WTP together from here. But, be warned, the Eclipse IDE for Java and Report Developers is a 188 MB download.
Specialised tools
There are some programs around to do the more specialised aspects of creating web pages such as KImageMapEditor or checking websites such as KLinkStatus.
