Even the most basic tools can be used to create HTML, but to speed up your work a dedicated HTML editor is a bonus. An advanced text editor such as Vi(vim) works great, and is undoubtably fast in the hands of an expert, but a program such as Quanta Plus, Bluefish, or Screem will aid your learning and provide ease of use.
I'm currently using Quanta Plus which appears much more mature than Bluefish but suffered from various ailments on my Mandrake 8.0 setup (although this could well have been my lack of understanding). I'm happy to mention that all the problems seem to have disappeared from Quanta under Mandrake 8.2. Quanta 3.0 is soon to be released for KDE3.0 and will be the editor to beat judging by the new features. I'd recommend you try this package first to see how you get on. Note that it includes most of the features that Bluefish lacks. Be sure to download the HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP documentation packages which, once installed, integrate beautifully. Right clicking on a tag and selecting the help option brings up all the relevent documentation on that tag. 1
update it's now a year on since I wrote this and I'm now using Quanta 3.1 to edit PHP and MySQL sites. It's a dream to use and has great syntax checking with php/mysql.
update it's now two years since I wrote this and I'm now using Quanta 3.1.4 to edit PHP and MySQL sites. It's just always dependable, a real workhorse app for people that like writing code. Note plugin HTML validation, CVS abilities and beautiful syntax help system.
Commercial version of Quanta.. Screenshots make it look more advanced than Homesite. HTML validation, FTP client and other good features. a demo version is avalible for downloadhttp://www.thekompany.com/products/quanta/
I used Bluefish 0.7 for a long time, and this would be my second choice. Bluefish includes many of the features of commercial products such as Homesite, the big current omission being a lack of an internal browser preview window. This isn't a major problem in practice as it supports direct links to your external browser and so viewing externally is only an extra mouse click. Be aware that this isn't version 1.0 yet, and it occasionally dies without warning on my system after long periods of work.
Mozilla has its own HTML composer which you may wish to try.
IBM's developerWorks also produces the Websphere design environment which has a HTML editor, but I was disappointed as it the part of the program built for HTML authoring/editing doesn't appear to be a very polished, the money having been spent elsewhere in the program. Not only is the GUI and tools somewhat lacking compared to Quanta, the inserted tags from the tools are all in capitals, a seemingly minor point perhaps but one that would have to be fixed if you are producing XHTML work which is case sensitive. Of course you may use the other more advanced features of this product alongaside a more purpose built editor such as Quanta or Bluefish.
Amaya is provided by the W3C. It seems to be a visual editor.
Freewear but not open source
Looking back: Show me something better than Quanta. I still use it. It's a great app.
1 Thanks to Michael Brooks for pointing that one out on the list.
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