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I vaguely remember trying this out, back in the days of Frontpage and dialup, before I settled on Notepad for editing HTML. I'm a little surprised that it was a

I vaguely remember trying this out, back in the days of Frontpage and dialup, before I settled on Notepad for editing HTML. I'm a little surprised that it was a going concern all the way up to 2012, and a little disappointed that it didn't keep going. Is anyone still working on WYSIWYG HTML editors, or is the segment completely dead?

pavlov 5y ago
There are many products in the WYSIWYG HTML editing space. Webflow is valued at $2B and started out as a Show HN post around 2013, IIRC.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  The biggest surprise to me is that Dreamweaver is still alive and kicking.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    To be honest, they should call it Nightmarecleaver.
    - 1-more 5y ago
      I've never used a better tool for imagemaps but then again that's the only one I've ever used.
badsectoracula 5y ago
There are some tools but most of them tend to be of the "edit visually, export to HTML" variety which, TBH, makes a bit more sense since pure HTML doesn't have enough information for keeping track of repeated elements and the structure of an entire site. Even tools back in the day when WYSIWYG was way more popular that worked with HTML directly tended to use custom tags and attributes for additional metadata.
gnufx 5y ago
The point of Amaya to me wasn't so much WYSIWYG HTML -- where "HTML" should probably be in scare quotes in most instances of such things. It was an actual SGML editor, respecting the DTD (like Emacs PSGML in that regard). I don't remember to what extent it was -- or could have been -- a general SGML editor with arbitrary DTDs. I also used it as a browser at one stage, but it was rather unstable then.
- dunham 5y ago
  I remember that there was a general SGML editor called Thot (from INRIA) that it was built on. I was interested in generic SGML/XML editors at the time. Aside from that, I think that Amaya was also used to provide a sample implementation of new/proposed web technologies. It's been a long time though and my memory is fuzzy.
  - gnufx 5y ago
    Ah, yes; it was a long time ago -- and a somewhat simpler time. Plenty of good stuff comes from INRIA.
c-smile 5y ago
> Is anyone still working on WYSIWYG HTML editors? Yep, I do time to time: https://html-notepad.com/ https://html-notepad.com/ ( based on my Sciter Engine https://sciter.com https://sciter.com ) It is almost impossible (mathematically speaking) to create reasonable WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor. So bad news for anyone looking for WYSIWYG editor to create meaningful web site from scratch using solely WYSIWYG. For web site creation the only reasonable option is wizard approach - assembling site from predefined and prestyled blocks. But, it is perfectly possible to create WYSIWYG HTML editor - editor that helps us to create and edit structured text - content portions of sites. That deals with pure HTML, styling is applied to that HTML at the point of content insertion.
bawolff 5y ago
Lots of visual editors on websites (e.g. wikipedia's editor) are really wysiwyg html editors for some specific subset of html (often using the browsers built in content-editable feature)

pavlov 5y ago

There are many products in the WYSIWYG HTML editing space. Webflow is valued at $2B and started out as a Show HN post around 2013, IIRC.

arkitaip 5y ago
The biggest surprise to me is that Dreamweaver is still alive and kicking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  To be honest, they should call it Nightmarecleaver.
  - 1-more 5y ago
    I've never used a better tool for imagemaps but then again that's the only one I've ever used.

badsectoracula 5y ago

There are some tools but most of them tend to be of the "edit visually, export to HTML" variety which, TBH, makes a bit more sense since pure HTML doesn't have enough information for keeping track of repeated elements and the structure of an entire site. Even tools back in the day when WYSIWYG was way more popular that worked with HTML directly tended to use custom tags and attributes for additional metadata.

gnufx 5y ago

The point of Amaya to me wasn't so much WYSIWYG HTML -- where "HTML" should probably be in scare quotes in most instances of such things. It was an actual SGML editor, respecting the DTD (like Emacs PSGML in that regard). I don't remember to what extent it was -- or could have been -- a general SGML editor with arbitrary DTDs. I also used it as a browser at one stage, but it was rather unstable then.

dunham 5y ago
I remember that there was a general SGML editor called Thot (from INRIA) that it was built on. I was interested in generic SGML/XML editors at the time. Aside from that, I think that Amaya was also used to provide a sample implementation of new/proposed web technologies. It's been a long time though and my memory is fuzzy.
- gnufx 5y ago
  Ah, yes; it was a long time ago -- and a somewhat simpler time. Plenty of good stuff comes from INRIA.

c-smile 5y ago

> Is anyone still working on WYSIWYG HTML editors? Yep, I do time to time: https://html-notepad.com/ https://html-notepad.com/ ( based on my Sciter Engine https://sciter.com https://sciter.com ) It is almost impossible (mathematically speaking) to create reasonable WYSIWYG HTML and CSS editor. So bad news for anyone looking for WYSIWYG editor to create meaningful web site from scratch using solely WYSIWYG. For web site creation the only reasonable option is wizard approach - assembling site from predefined and prestyled blocks. But, it is perfectly possible to create WYSIWYG HTML editor - editor that helps us to create and edit structured text - content portions of sites. That deals with pure HTML, styling is applied to that HTML at the point of content insertion.

bawolff 5y ago

Lots of visual editors on websites (e.g. wikipedia's editor) are really wysiwyg html editors for some specific subset of html (often using the browsers built in content-editable feature)