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I felt at home with PageSpinner as soon as I started using it.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Good Web-page editors for Mac OS X, including two free versions


July 23, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   Ever since I started writing this column, people who know that I create my own Web pages have asked me to recommend an HTML editor for modern Macintoshes. I have three recommendations this week, and I'm adding a few other HTML programs you might be interested in trying.
   My favorite Windows HTML editors are free, so I've tried to hunt down free Web editors for Mac OS X, too. There aren't as many good free Web editors as there are for Windows, no doubt because Mac OS X is a younger operating system, and the ones I've tried aren't as polished as the freeware Windows HTML editor I've used for years.
   So my list has two freeware HTML editors and one payware program. The free ones are Taco, from www.tacosw.com, and Plain Old HTML Editor, from Single Brain Cell Software at http://homepages.tig.com.au/~cthulhu/sbc/index.html.
   The payware program is PageSpinner from www.optima-system.com, which costs $70. You can try it for free.
   Taco is cool. The name is cool, the approach the software author takes is cool (if you like the program and want to pay for it, send a donation to an Ohio charity instead) and the overall "feel" of Taco is cool.
   HTML code is color-coded in Taco, an advantage over Plain Old HTML Editor, which is just as competent but lacks color coding of any kind. I've worked for years with HTML editors that colored various parts of the hypertext markup language code, and I consider it almost essential.
   Both of the free editors handle word-wrap properly, but I wasn't able to turn off word-wrap in Plain Old HTML Editor. (That's hardly essential, but I've found it helpful when working on pages that have lines of text that have hard-coded lengths, such as parts of the photo essay my wife, Nancy, and I wrote about Amazon children.
   Both of the free editors provide easily insertable examples of HTML commands, but Taco's list is far more useful than the one in Plain Old HTML Editor. You could create complex Web pages with Taco without needing to look up a line of code.
   PageSpinner is clearly more capable than its freeware rivals. I appreciated the "Notebook" you can open when working with PageSpinner so you can store snippets of code, and everything about the way PageSpinner seems well designed. I'm also impressed with PageSpinner's help, both online and in the program's menu.
   I felt at home with PageSpinner as soon as I started using it. Color coding, HTML helper menus and the incorporation of many modern HTML functions make PageSpinner an obvious choice if you are able to afford the price of the software.
   A brief note about HTML editing styles: I am a minimalist Web coder. In my own Web operations, I refuse to use programs that create pages on their own, such as Microsoft's FrontPage, because they usually create bloated code that is hard to fix. Another liability: They don't help users learn HTML at all. You have to know at least something about HTML to make good Web pages.