The web editors battle to CSS

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From the buzz at the WaSP:

GoLive to Join CS 2.0

According to ThinkSecret, a revived GoLive 8.0 will join Creative Suite v2.0 to be released in early 2005. The news item reports Adobe is working to improve the handling of CSS content including a toolbar for adjusting CSS layouts.

Also getting a makeover is the grid element for CSS DIV authoring for easy switching between DIV and T-t-table layout views.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles CSS in comparison to Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. Will GoLive have a chance against Dreamweaver? Maybe it’s too late? Maybe not - after all, Firefox managed to shake up IE and Dreamweaver is not as dominant in Web authoring as IE is in Web browsing.

Macromedia is not yet there, so yes, Adobe has an opportunity in this battle.

Along with my long-standing quest for a web standards-compliant rich text editor, the lack of good support for CSS in the mainstream visual editors that are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive is one of the major stumbling blocks for adopting web standards in certain situations, such as a company with its own internal web staff. The first software editor to deliver a good solution, notably one that handles CSS-P properly, will not get unnoticed, as it will remove a big burden for many people who would like to adopt modern methods but don't have the time, the need for or (let's be honest) the capacity and/or the willing to learn the code behind.

I know some purists who will claim that hand-coding pages is still the way to go, but the reality is that the vast majority of the pages out there are not hand crafted but generated by one wysiwyg tool or another, by people who have little to no clue of the underlying code. And there is absolutely no reason why this would change in the future, on the contrary.