Everyone has a favorite editor. HTML-Kit 292 is a free HTML editor that has been my favorite over the last few years. They have a new alpha version called HTML-Kit Tools, which while not free, costs only $25 (which is the cost for site membership, not for the tool itself. Site membership also entitles users to other benefits).
I am not going to go into a complete list of features nor provide a complete HTML editor review. You can check out the features of HTML-Kit 292 and HTML-Kit Tools on your own. The best advice is to download a copy and test drive it!
HTML-Kit is not a WYSIWYG editor. Frankly, I think WYSIWYG editors are a poor way to go, even for the beginner. It is so very important to understand the code underneath a web page. HTML is not all that difficult to understand (see the Web Site Design Tutorials link on the left menu for help). WYSIWYG editors often add lots of their own code which makes debugging difficult. Take the time to learn HTML and use an easy HTML editor like HTML-Kit. In the long run, you will be better served.
HTML-Kit It is not just an editor for HTML. It includes language-level color coding support for HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS / XLS / XSLT Style Sheets, JavaScript / JScript / LiveWire, VBScript / Visual Basic, ASP, PHP, Perl, iHTML, Java, Python, C/C++, .NET C#, Delphi / Pascal, INI.
Things I like about HTML-Kit:
- Ease of use
- The action bar is a tool bar that includes all possible HTML tags. Wonderful resource whenever I have a brain freeze.
- Preview Window – one quick click on the tab and I can see what I have been building in the Editor Window.
- Built in HTML Tidy Validator
- Website support. Excellent user community and plenty of plugins.
- Create your own templates and Snippets. Create templates for redundant work. Create snippets for code that you reuse on a constant basis (i.e. forms). Never have to recreate anything from scratch again!
- Integrated FTP interface – Edit remote files.
- Simple W3C Validation – one click and it sends the file being worked on to the W3C validator. Saves one step at the least.
- Free!
This very website was developed using HTML-Kit.
