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It can be hard or an easy decision to chose a Web Editor. There are a lot of products available in the market today. Web Editors should not be chosed on the basis of price and what the others are using. It’s pretty important to choose a Web Editor which satisfies your needs and budget. There are little useful tips in buying Web Editor which makes a great one.

Operating system and price

These are the facts which have to be kept in mind- if an Editor won’t work for your OS (operating system) or it is not affordable, then don’t download or buy it. Than the price there are a lot of other features to a good Web Page Editor or whether the Editor it runs Mac OS or other OS.

What type of a Web Editor is it?

There are 3 types of Editors available, they are:

Text Editors: these Editors let you to edit HTML tags directly and not in a visual way.
WYSIWYG Editors: these Editors let you to edit WebPages in visual manner and not the HTML directly
Combo Editors: these editors let you to edit either text or WYSIWYG depending upon your style or mood.

An Editor that offers you both will be more useful and gets more points than the one that is only text or WYSIWYG. What ever type of Editor you use it has come with HTML validator attached to it so that you can gain more points. Having an HTML validator saves you a lot of time in the long run. Text Editors should come with tag completion and colour coding.

Managing web pages:

Many Web Editors which are more powerful comes attached with Site Managers (projects). This site manager helps you to keep the files of one Website at a particular place. By doing so the Web Editor manipulates the files as sites rather than a single file. Here Web Editors manipulate the single files through FTP. Using replace and search, Web Editors help you to manage the files.

Images

Some of the Webpage Editors provides you with limited image editing in its tool like resizing and cropping. If these Web Editors can connect to other (outside) image editors, it makes more convenient to use.

Special characters, CSS and Java script

In most of the Editors these days you can write CSS styles, if the Editor is embedded with style library, CSS validator and CSS editor. With Web Editor it is easy to write CSS WebPages. This is the same case with Java script.
Web designers mostly forget about special characters. If the text is written in English, it’s easy to assume that, for an accented character you will not require to know the codes for that.

Conveniences of Web Editors

The ability of the Web Editors to connect with data base
Support for the languages like ASP, JSP, cold fusion and PHP.
Spell checkers ignoring tags will be critical.
Some of the Editors provide you with photo gallery maker

As discussed earlier, the HTML editors are those software applications which are used to design, create and manage high end web sites without writing HTML code. With HTML editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Dreamweaver, anyone can make web pages. From novice to professionals to web experts, everyone is using these editors to effectively mange their web sites. But as every technology has its own merits and demerits, the HTML editors also have its own virtues and vices. Let’s have a look at both the positives and negatives of the editors, as it will lead to better understanding of these kinds of applications.

Advantages of HTML Editors:

1. HTML editors allow you to draft web pages quickly. The most impressive aspect of these editors is that you don’t have to know about HTML codes at all in order to design your web site.
2. HTML editors not only help in creating the web pages, but it also maintains the site map and global structure of the whole web site. Thus, if in future the web site becomes complex you don’t have to face any type of issues while updating and maintaining it.
3. HTML editors help in maintaining consistency throughout the whole web site. If your web site contains large number of pages and if you want a particular element to be displayed on the top of each web page (for example your company logo), then instead of putting the element one by one on each of the HTML document you can simply put it one any one page and the editor will update it on the remaining ones.
4. HTML editors let you to insert complex elements into the web page with ease. For example: you can quickly insert flash animations, fireworks file etc. into your web site.
5. Forms, tables, frames and other important elements can be easily managed via HTML editors.
6. Not only in web designing, but the HTML editor also helps in generating the scripts for the web sites.
7. HTML editors also let you to easily embed DHTML effects into your web page.
8. With the help of HTML editor library, you can easily manage and access the frequently used resources.
9. HTML editors are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) applications. So, you can easily know how your web page will finally look like on the web browser.

Disadvantages of HTML Editors:

1. No doubt that HTML editor makes it easy to create and maintain web sites but they are overloaded with lots of features. So, it is difficult for a newbie to first of all understand the working of the editor properly.
2. HTML editors are poor in error reporting. It may not very much effective in telling you about the bugs in the code.
3. The programming style (style of writing the HTML code) of a HTML editor is entirely different than your style. The editors write the code in a complex and professional manner. So, it would be difficult for an amateur web developer to understand it.
4. Due to lots of features, the HTML editors have become overcrowded. It is very difficult to know about all the available features and their usage.
5. No HTML editor is complete in itself. As the web standards are updated, these editors start getting obsolete.