September 2009 Meeting Report: Free Software for Web Editing

The September meeting of PACS was devoted to free and open source software. With that theme in mind, at the CSS Workshop we looked at HTML editors and related programs that are free and in some cases open source.

We started with a current listing of free programs at Best Free WYSIWYG HTML Page Editor Review.

We looked at these editors:

• Amaya, an open source editor from the W3C. Last updated September 9, 2009.


• SeaMonkey, an internet application suite based on the Mozilla source. Includes an editor called Composer. We looked at a beta of version 2, released September 12, 2009.


• PageBreeze, a commercial product that is free for personal, not-for-profit, or educational use.


• CoffeeCup, another commercial product that has a free version which has some features not activated.

We also looked at two other applications for web development:

• FileZilla, an open source FTP client.


• TopStyle, a commercial CSS editor. There is a free version that has a nag screen and has some limts to its functionality.

September 2009 Meeting Announcement

The first meeting of the season for the PACS CSS Workshop will take place on September 19. We will again meet at the 9-10 hour in the Alps Room.

This month, the theme of the PACS meeting is Software Freedom Day. The group will be highlighting free and open source software throughout the day. In line with that theme, we will start our session with a look at free HTML editors. These programs let you do WYSIWYG editing without spending the money for Dreamweaver or other commercial editor.

Depending on time, we will then start on our topic for the next couple of meetings. Last season, we worked through using CSS to style a navigation menu. This year, we will take the next step and incorporate images, so as to create more attractive and user-friendly navigation buttons.