Every time you turn around, somebody's posting a new HTML editor on the Web for building your own Web page. The trouble is, most of these programs do something that's anathema to anyone with experience creating Web pages: They dress up the HTML commands and hide them behind proprietary page-output viewers - as if that will spare us having to get in there and polish the code to a fine luster. That's hogwash. For serious HTML editing, you need Sausage Software's shareware HTML editor, HotDog Professional 3.0.
Features
Although the package can do colored tags, has a real-time output viewer, and provides quick-click shortcuts for inserting preformatted HTML code, it's really designed for serious hands-on coding. HotDog sports such power features as templates, Search and Replace across multiple documents, built-in spell-checking, an HTML syntax checker, HTML import and export conversion, multiple levels of undo, and a useful set of configuration options.
Summary
On the downside, HotDog is very unreliable. It is often very sluggish even on a Pentium 166 with 16 MB of physical RAM. It occasionally has trouble with its own screen updating, and also with displaying the HTML document on the fly, using DDE to switch focus to your web browser. It is one of the best not because of it's good features and response (of which there aren't all that many) but because of the fact that there are so many bad ones out there, the exact oposite of the Browser wars.
Overall, I feel that the best HTML editor is HomeSite for Windows 95 (which also works on Windows NT 4.0) and HotDog only comes second by default.
You can decide for yourself by downloading a free 30-day trial version from Sausage Software's Web site www.sausage.com.
