Until about four months ago, I used FrontPage 2003 as my HTML editor. Shut up. Seriously, shut up. It was a wonderful program, despite being old. But I wanted to keep up with the times, and SeaMonkey is now my tool of choice for doing HTML. Some thoughts and tips, below.
First of all, I’m not a web designer. I’m not using an HTML editor to design web sites. I’m using one because I’m a web writer. My copy is primarily headed toward the web, and using an HTML editor can make that life much easier.
I mostly publish through WordPress. Often, I compose right within the WordPress blogging software itself. However, there are times when I can’t. I might on a plane with no connectivity, for example. I might be live blogging an event where the connectivity can be iffy, despite always packing my own broadband card A good, offline HTML editor is useful.
Why not use something like Word? Bad code. I want to copy and paste from my HTML editor without having weird DIVs and fonts and other garbage being translated across.
That’s why I stuck with FrontPage for so long. It worked. It created nice, clean code that I could copy and paste into anything. It also packed a nice spell-checker, a thesaurus plus there was an autosave add-on floating out there. It was all a writer could want.
Still, it got to be a hassle trying to track down the various CDs I needed to reinstall the software on a new computer. Also, when I was pondering moving to an all-Mac world, I needed an alternative to FrontPage. Sean Carlos suggested Seamonkey. It’s been great.
SeaMonkey is an internet “suite” from Mozilla, the Firefox people. It provides a browser, email, news reading, chat and HTML authoring in one tool.
I don’t care about the stuff other than HTML authoring. In fact, I don’t get why when I already use Mozilla Firefox — and possibly might use Mozilla Thunderbird for email — that there’s this other “suite” sitting out there from Mozilla. Me, I think they should just focus the entire project on the HTML tool.
Indeed, that’s what sparked this post. One of the annoying things about SeaMonkey is that when you start it, it loads in “browser” mode. Want to compose a new HTML file? You then have to do a File > New Composer Page routine from the menu to make that happen.
I complained about this yesterday on Twitter, and Mike Perry suggested that there might be a command line option to solve this. And there was.
The options are here. To make it work for Windows 7 (and this will probably work back to Windows XP), I did this:
- Open the SeaMonkey shortcut (or make one)
- Right click to view properties
- Find the Target line (on the Shortcut tab in Windows 7)
- Add -editor after the exiting code on the Target line
- Save. You’re done
The target line for me before looked like this:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\SeaMonkey\seamonkey.exe”
And after it looked like this, with the new part in bold:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\SeaMonkey\seamonkey.exe” -editor
Do that, and now SeaMonkey will start with a new composer window and in composer mode.
Now I have two last wishes: auto-save and a thesaurus.
There’s probably a plugin out there that will give me a thesaurus. If I find it, I’ll update this later. For a writer, having a thesaurus built into your writing tool is a must.
As for auto-save, what the hell is wrong with developers? FrontPage lacked a built-in auto-save through all versions of the product. Now yet another authoring tool lacks this — nor are there third party tools that I can find which add auto-save to it.
Auto-save is an essential, as anyone who has ever lost work knows. Word processing programs have had auto-save since as long as I can remember — and I can remember doing WordStar commands. Someone, anyone, please add auto-save to SeaMonkey!
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Okay Danny, I’ve downloaded SeaMonkey and it looks interesting but I don’t see any real advantages over Kompozer. Are there any?
Have you tried Live Writer? It blows all other blog clients away, and it’s free. Has pretty full-featured WYSIWYG and HTML editing modes. It should work with WordPress.
Man, I installed that, and it was like a blast from the past, much like the old Netscape suite, even had the IRC Chat client. I think they kept this around, even after splitting up the old suite into Firefox, and Thunderbird, to have a suite to offer corporations who might want to have just one app to install and maintain. I might give this a shot, it seems as fast as Firefox in some informal testing.
I’ve used Windows Live Writer, and it is a very slick program. I’ve used to maintain WordPress blogs, and it will download the theme you’re using, so as you compose you see it near WYSIWYG.
I don’t see much in the way of Add-On’s or Extensions support in SeaMonkey (yet) – but maybe that’s not a bad thing. I tend to load Firefox up with too much, slows it down.
” used FrontPage 2003 as my HTML editor. Shut up. Seriously, shut up.”
I completely lost it here, Danny – very funny.
I would argue that FrontPage did NOT create good code…but I’ll shut up.
Brad, Scribilus, thanks for the tips on Kompozer and Live Writer. I’ll check them out.
Marty, it did produce clean code because all I was doing really was writing in it. It spit out text withing
tags, and that’s about as clean as you could want
If you wanted to style up a page, like lots of programs, then things became more complicated. But it was better than some programs where even if you were doing plain text, they shoved in a lot of garbage.
actually the composer built into seamonkey is the same exact composer that was in the early netscape, which was pre-2000.
So your frontpage 2003 was newer technology.
Good on you for sticking with a product whilst it was useful. I still use HomeSite 3 every single day and that’s 15 years old now!
Can LiveWriter be used to update websites that are not blogs? For example, can we update a plain XHTML (strict 1.0) web page with LiveWriter without using any other software or plug-in?
Nice post. I am a huge hater of Dreamweaver and want to use something else. Is there a way to get local HTML documents to load in SeaMonkey on the Mac? It’s a huge, huge fail that there’s no easy option for this but if there’s a way to make it work it would be a possible contender, since I am also doing very simple editing (just making HTML soup to paste into my website).
Thanks for the post, Danny.
I downloaded Seamonkey after finding good reviews for it as an HTML editor.
My early experience with it has really sucked. I looked everywhere for some mention of their editor, and their web site was a complete waste of time. It was as though they didn’t have such a thing. I read all their help pages, and found nothing.
Then I found your blog, and it is far more helpful than anything on their website. But it raises further puzzling issues. On your blog, you mention that to get into the editor to take the route “… File > New Composer Page routine from the menu to make that happen.”
I downloaded 2.09 and this option does not appear when I click on “File”. Hmmmm ….
However, when I create the shortcut you invented, it works perfectly.
Now, after a couple of fruitless hours trying to cope with Seamonkey’s mystery, I can actually get on and check it out.
But I have to thank the other commenters for their alternative suggestions. I will be trying them.
I should declare my prejudices. Back when Netscape was a free browser, they also were selling it. With Microsoft snapping at their heels, I felt that the right thing to do would be to buy their boxed offering (which cost about $50) which I saw as a donation to a worthy cause. In fact, this came with free updates for two years, something that free users would have got for free.
Well, dealing with Nestcape was a total pain in the butt. I never got an update, and when I contacted them about it, they refused to address the issue, which I figured was incredibly insulting to one of their financial supporters.
So I dumped the paid version, downloaded the same thing for free, and got the updates no problem. I have personally built two national companies in the computer industry (one in Australia, one in the US) and I found Netscape’s arrogance towards paying customers breathtaking. At that point, I realized that, despite their huge contribution to the internet, they deserved to disappear as a company.
Today, the same lack of care in documentation and user support is setting the stage for the remnants of the Netscape implosion to disappear (both Mozilla and Seamonkey), despite their excellent interim contributions to spur browser development by Microsoft and others to far greater user functionality.
What chop uses Frontpage? I mean really.
Under preferences.. appearance, you can set it up so that when you open seamonkey, it opens as the html editor (the default is browser). I am a big fan of seamonkey, because like you said, it creates very clean code and seems to use the lowest common denominator for the difference browsers. I test all my pages in all the major browsers, and sometimes using different html editors can cause funky results. Rarely I will have a centering error with IE when using seamonkey, but that is it.
Go ahead and laugh at FrontPage – but with a couple of little basic adjustments in your settings and templates you could easily produce clean code, with no additional crap, and very quickly. I know, I used it up until 2006. Most of the software mentioned above has been slower and/or more complicated.
Got you all beat: I still use Front Page Express. And I have the installer for it.
If all you want in a web page is text, hyperlinks and tables, you can’t beat Front Page Express for simplicity. But mostly I use it to copy blocks of text from a web page to paste into other applications. With FPE it’s easy to strip out all the graphics, scripts and unecessary code.