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Expression Web is part of Microsoft's media-creation suite. They've finally abandoned FrontPage, which for years produced some of the worst-coded, Internet-Explorer-only sites on the web. Expression Web is more compliant with web coding and hosting standards.
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Macromedia's DreamWeaver is a WYSIWYG tool for people who don't like WYSIWYG tools (or those who do, I suppose). It gives you the point-and-click ease of FrontPage, but still gives you full control over everything. You can tell DreamWeaver what standard JavaScript effects you want to use, and it will write the code for you. But if you want to do some hand-coding (of HTML or JavaScript), DreamWeaver will let you, and it will leave it alone. Its also far more than just a web-page editor; its site management tools are first-rate, and it includes powerful database, Dynamic HTML, and scripting capabilities using JSP, ColdFusion, and PHP (or ASP).
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HomeSite is the standard by which HTML editors are usually judged. The program is now developed by Macromedia, a solid developer of graphics and web-developing tools; it was pretty darn good from the start, and has gotten stronger over the years. You need to learn and understand HTML to make use of HomeSite (or any other HTML-based editor), but it provides lots of tools to make coding easier, and once you get the hang of it, you'll wonder how you could ever go back to a clumsy WYSIWYG tool like FrontPage.
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TopStyle is developed by the person who created HomeSite, and it's nice that he hasn't been restricted by a non-compete clause in the sale agreement, because he's gone on to produce a worthy "upgrade" for HomeSite users. One of its key benefits is strong support for cascading style sheets; it can even be configured to act as an auxiliary CSS editor for other HTML editors that aren't as strong in this area.
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HotDog Professional is the latest incarnation of what Web old-timers will remember as the first really good HTML editor for Windows. It provides all the tools you need for coding with HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, and (if you must) Microsoft's Active Server Pages and VBScript. They offer a version called HotDog PageWiz that offers templates and "wizards" to help novices get started, then helps them maintain and fine tune the site. HotDog Junior is designed to help kids design their own web pages.
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Softpress Freeway is a WYSIWYG tool for Mac OS with some remarkable features, including drag-and-drop of files of nearly any type, the ability to use whatever fonts you have on your computer (which it will convert into image files for the actual web page, but leaving the original text editable), and on-the-fly compositing of transparent (and partially-transparent) images in native Photoshop format. Although it's most appealing to those who favor the DTP approach to web design, it still offers a lot to code geeks. Available in "Express" and "Pro" versions.
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Evrsoft 1st Page is a professionally-developed free (but not open source) HTML editor for Windows that can operate in any of several different modes, ranging from "easy" (with big friendly buttons) to "expert" (tabbed button bars like HomeSite) to "hardcore" (a nearly icon-free keyboard-driven interface), so it can be useful for new coders and "grow up" with them. It comes with a complement of scripts (including JavaScript, Perl, VBscript, DHTML) that can be used in your sites, and lets you build your own library of code snippets to draw from.
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Taco HTML Editor is a freeware HTML editor for Mac OS X. It's developed by a college student in his spare time, but it has a lot of handy features (some of which simply take advantage of toolkits built into OS X), including colored code, live previews, and drag-and-drop linking of pages.
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If you don't want to get into coding or do anything especially fancy, Composer is a good choice, especially since it's available free of charge as part of the open source Mozilla package (as well as its more commercial freeware cousin Netscape). It's about as perfect a WYSIWYG tool as you can get, because the editing tool is itself a web browser. It's a great tool to give to non-computer-savvy people who need to update web content, because it lets them see exactly what they're doing as they do it, and it will generally keep them from seriously mangling the underlying HTML code. The company responsible for Lindows has begun enhancing this tool, which they'll be releasing as Nvu
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Serif WebPlus is geared directly to substitute for FrontPage, serving as a handy tool for novices to set up web sites, with enough features to make them look snazzy if you're so inclined. It includes a multiple-document WYSIWYG interface, and a bunch of graphics and wizards to make it easier to setup various kinds of pages, but it still gives you the ability to edit the HTML code directly. And it's fairly cheap.
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GoLive is Adobe's high-end web development tool, intended for large- to medium-sized professional sites with multiple developers. (Users of the discontinued Adobe PageMill should look elsewhere.) It combines WYSIWYG development, source-code editing, support for Dynamic HTML, and extensive site management tools. And of course it works well with PhotoShop and Adobe's other excellent software.
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Namo WebEditor is an affordable tool that balances ease-of-use, quick-start features like site-building "wizards" and WYSIWYG manipulation of the design, with advanced features such as direct HTML editing (and preservation), support for database publishing using PHP or JSP (or ASP), and built-in graphic manipulation tools.
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NetObjects Fusion makes it easy to quickly build web sites by dragging and dropping things where you want them. It's designed for both power and efficiency, and they claim some incredible productivity advantages over other development tools. By taking advantage of it's "wizards" and pre-defined style sheets, you can save a lot of time.
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BlueFish is an HTML editor for Unix-like systems with the GNOME environment installed. It will look very familiar to former HomeSite users who've migrated to Linux. It even has the custom keyboard-usable menu that was available in earlier versions of HomeSite, but has since been dropped. Although it's still on less-than-1 version numbers, it's already very usable.
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Quanta+ is an HTML editor that works on Unix-like systems with KDE installed. Like BlueFish, it is very HomeSite-like. A WYSIWYG mode is reportedly being planned. Recommended by dweebie-Star-Trek-star-turned-cool-computer-geek Wil Wheaton.
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OpenOffice/StarOffice HTML Editor is a fairly good editor with both WYSIWYG and HTML editing modes. Neither WYSIWYG nor HTML mode is a match in terms of features or usability for other stand-alone authoring tools, but as part of the free, open-source OpenOffice or the Sun-supported commercial StarOffice, it looks and works uncannily like the word processing module in those suites, and it's a handy tool for people who use either of them. For Windows and Unix-like systems, with versions for Mac OS X and OS/2 as well.
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WebMaker is fairly simple, small, freeware editor that includes color coding of HTML or VBScript code, an integrated previewer, a scripting system that can automate the creation of boilerplate pages, and user-customizable menus. It's nice for people who want something better than Notepad, but without the overhead or cost of a more fancy editor.
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August is a free open-source HTML editor for Unix-like systems. It's written and distributed as a Tcl/Tk script, which makes it easily customisable. It's certainly not the most powerful editor out there, but it gets the job done and its modest system dependencies (X11 and Tcl/Tk) could be appealing if you don't use Gnome or KDE.
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Amaya is a project of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, the body that sets standards for the web), to produce an open-source tool featuring integrated web-browsing and web-authoring. This was Tim Berners-Lee's original conception of how one would use this "Web" thing he invented (and since he's a member of the W3C, it makes sense that they'd produce a tool of this sort). It's available for Windows, NT, Linux, Solaris, and AIX (and can be compiled for any other Unix).
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Much of the early Web was built using GNU Emacs. It's one of the quintessential geek tools, an editor that can be programmed to aid in a wide variety of tasks that involve editing text. Naturally, there are HTML-editing packages for it. Not recommended for the technologically challenged; highly recommended for those who demand full control of their working environment and can handle that responsibility. XEmacs is a graphical version. Like most GNU tools, it can run on nearly any Unix-like operating systems (plus a few others), and like all GNU software, it's free.
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The other classic geek tool for web development is vi (pronounced "vee-eye"), short for "visual interface". It was the first usable screen-based (rather than command-line-based) text editor for Unix. It - or vim ("vi improved") - is included with nearly every Unix-like system, and ported or cloned on most other operating systems. Although it's not very intuitive, it's fairly easy to learn the basic functions, and there's a lot of speed and flexibility in it for those keen on learning it. Vim is charityware.
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Edit Revolution is a free HTML editor for DOS. Anachronistic as that sounds, it's a blessing for anyone who wants to make use of garage-sale equipment that can't run Win95 or Linux. (Imagine doing Web development on the go, on a vintage Poqet PC) And contrary to what you might assume, it's a rather up-to-date tool (e.g. It knows the HTML 4.0 spec) with handy time-saving features. Download it from here.
(A graphical Web browser for DOS is Arachne.)
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GINF (a recursive abbreviation for "GINF Is Not Frontpage") is a WYSIWYG editor for Linux, created by two university students in India as a class project. It's fairly rudimentary, but appears to provide a good foundation for a useful visual web development tool for Unix-like systems.
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Java-compatible systems,
Symbian OS,
Palm OS,
Netware,