Does it exist a simple, free, decent HTML editor?

[Fabrizio Giudici]

The past summer I was so happy I was able to get rid of the good, but
elephantiac CMS I've been using for years, replacing it with a very small
and light home made CMS. The basic point is that I just need to edit HTML
fragments in a filesystem (a Mercurial one, for practicity). The problem
is that so far I've been unable to find a simple HTML, free editor that
doesn't require me to change lots of things manually. Once upon a time I
used Kompozer, but the project seems dead. Time ago I saw a recommendation
for Amaya, but on Mac OS X it is practically unusable (the editor
"flashes" nearly at each key type and gets easily messed up, so after a
few minutes it makes you wanting to throw the laptop out of the window). A
few days ago I started using the Composer from SeaMonkey. Apparently it's
fine, but:

1. It doesn't honor a preference setting that would mandate the use of <p>
instead of <br> at each CR.
2. When I mark something italic, the thing doesn't use <i> or <em>, but
<span> with a font-style attribute, sometimes even applying it to an
enclosing tag (such as <a>). Stupid thing: in my photo blog I've picked
fonts so that for emphasized text I use a different font, so just changing
style is not enough and a full tag to bind to a CSS style is needed.
3. Last but not least I'd appreciate an option that doesn't do urlencoding
inside attributes. I use ${...} expansion such as <img src="$(mediaLink
path='/foo/bar.jpg')$"> and I'm not happy to see it such vandalized as
<img src="$%27mediaLink path=%28/foo/bar.jpg%28%29$">. I do know that HTML
mandates urlencoding for publishing, but it doesn't seem to me an uncommon
thing that HTML is preprocessed by a tool before publishing, so an editor
might leave things alone if instructed to do so.
4. XHTML would be appreciated, but not mandatory.

Thanks.

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
fabrizio...@tidalwave.it
http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it

[Roland Tepp]

It seems what you are after is a WYSIWYG editor and there are few options out there but none of them I know of are free. I've played with RapidWeaver for a few times and it is promising.

However it seems you are quite particular about the HTML it has to spew out, so I am going out on a limb here and recommend trying out few HTML code editors that are quite excellent (if not free either)

TextMate - an excellent choice with tons of extensibility through leveraging of the native unix shell scripting features and all the languages that are available to the system underneath. Extremely popular and. I rand community of extension writers.

Espresso - my personal favorite. An extensible text editor with very nice and polished ui features that make it a breeze to use.

Coda - also very popular code editor. I used it exclusively until I found Espresso.