What's a good, easy-to-use and inexpensive tool for an HTML newbie to use to generate nice, clean XHTML?

Asked by ETpro (34605

) August 11th, 2010

I build lots of Yahoo! Stores. The Yahoo! Store back end includes a Content Management System (CMS) that lets store owners use HTML markup in the long descriptions they pour into the CMS to update their store catalog.

Often, store owners want to enhance the look of the descriptions with headlines, bullet lists, images, links, etc. The Yahoo! CMS does not have any built-in wizard for enhancing text with HTML tags, and it is outside my control. I can’t program the CMS in any way except in adding custom variables to it. It does, however, accept either plain text or XHTML formatted text, and store owners can access the CSS files that further control the display of their site.

My problem is that a lot of the people who select a Yahoo! Store for their ecommerce platform do so because it’s easy to use and they are not HTML literate or programmers. For these newbies, I would like to recommend a simple, easy to grasp XHTML editor they could download and license for a reasonable price. They don’t need the cost or learning curve of Dreamweaver.

I want to avoid WYSIWYG editors that work via absolute positioning and embed tons of local CSS to position things. Any suggestions on an XHTML editor that would fit this bill?

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2 Answers

Textmate or Coda on Mac. I use Textmate 100% of the time.

I dunno on PC…Notepad or Dreamweaver? I never use PC’s

wenn (2673

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@wenn Thanks. Most of my customers use a PC, of course. I wouldn’t want to steer them to a free text editor like Notepad. I write code in text editors, but I’ve been doing it for 15 years. It gets to be like the matrix. You can look at all that gibberish on the screen and see the picture it will make. But newbies just see a confusing stream of cascading characters. :-)

ETpro (34605

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