The list test
One of the oldtimers in the thriftmac collection will soon be freeware no more. Taco HTML Edit, which has been free since 2002, will cost $25.95 this summer as the developer moves to version 2. It’s a bit of a disappointment, to be sure, but we all have to make a living — so all the more power to him.
Taco’s transition got me thinking. There are plenty of text editors for the Mac, both free and commercial, but how many are actually called HTML editors. The only other one I know of is PageSpinner, which at $29.95 will likely be the main competition for Taco.
For those wanting to stick with freeware, Smultron and TextWrangler will remain as the best options. They go with the trend of the past few years where many web designers code by memory and use custom snippets for the tricky parts.
Still, for my own work, I do enjoy having some HTML help now and then. And for that, the gold standard is BBEdit. If you need to create an unordered list, for example, just type out the list items, highlight them, then click on Markup – Lists – Unordered. Everything is done for you.
Since lists have become quite common in markup for websites (think of navigation as a list, for example), I decided to use the ease of creating a list as the test for comparing Taco HTML Edit, PageSpinner, Smultron and TextWrangler.
Taco HTML Edit: Click on Insert – List, choose your options, click OK, and an empty list appears. You then must type your list items in amongst the markup. Apart from this, there are a few oddities, such as insisting on inserting the type of marker that goes in front of each item instead of just allowing the default. It also makes the closing markup for each list item optional. Modern coding should always have a closing tag, so it’s a bit of a nuisance to have to check this on.
PageSpinner: Highlight your list items and click on the List icon in the tool bar. Each item gets its own markup, but there is no markup to indicate whether it is ordered or unordered. You can add List to the menubar, which allows you to get all the markup for a proper list, but it must be done in two steps: List – List Item, followed by List – Unordered List.
Smultron: There are no HTML tools, but snippets come to the rescue — almost. Create your list of items, highlight them, click on Tools – Snippets – HTML – List. Unfortunately it only works for one list item. If you have more than one, they will all be put on the same line. You could get around this by creating the markup for just one, then copying a pasting — but would you really want to?
TextWrangler: I could find no way, not even with snippets, to make HTML coding easier. It’s hardly surprising since TextWrangler is made by the same folks as BBEdit and they would no doubt prefer that you upgrade to the paid product if you want HTML convenience.
Conclusion: None of the editors tested meet the BBEdit standard, but some come close. Now that Taco HTML Edit is going commercial, this product will have to differentiate itself enough to make people want to pay for it rather than settling for the freeware Smultron. Taco will also have to be good enough at $24.95 that people won’t be tempted to pay $5 more for PageSpinner, which at version 5 had added many, many features over the years.
Links
Taco HTML Editor
PageSpinner
Smultron
TextWrangler
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008 in Reviews
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