I admit it. I use SeaMonkey Composer, a tool whose look and feel is straight from the late 90s, to create specific kinds of webpages. Now look, it's almost always webpages where I'm keeping notes for myself to read later, not webpages to publish anywhere (though I guess I did use it to create the skeleton for my syllabi when I was teaching during grad school). And I use html because I know, better than any other file format, how to make it do what I want without much hassle. That is, it's easier for me to format a web page than it is to do the same thing in, say, Word. Given my work experience, not only does that make sense, you've kinda got to hope html familiarity would be the case.

Anyhow, what I've always liked about Composer most is that it gives you nice, clean, unoffensive html -- for the most part[1] -- and does so a bit better than Blue Griffon, which grew out of its codebase. (NVu wasn't bad, but it and Kompozer didn't last long at all.) You can easily take the "frame" html Composer gives you and give it a little custom markup to have a clear, well-formatted page. And it's not destructive when you type something into the source itself, which is wonderful. You can do that on the source pane or, even better, highlight a WYSIWYG chunk, hit alt-I-H, and knock yourself out.

But recently (?), I've noticed that it really, really dislikes understanding code as monolithicly (sp?) formatted blocks, and wants to apply tags in a much too atomic fashion. Here's an example where I Ctrl-T'd a block of text that I wanted to display in a monospace font:

<tt>The following example can be used to assign the “MyTag” tag to all virtual machines whose name contains</tt><tt><br></tt><tt>the “myvm” wildcard pattern.</tt><tt><br></tt>

Really, Composer? You have separate <tt> tags not only for each line of text, but for each line break? Are you crazy insane? Really wish it'd be a bit smarter about blocking text. Too bad it's not written in C#; I'm not sure I'm ready to learn C and this codebase just to patch a SeaMonkey Composer bug. ;^)

[1] Clean html except for that stupid line insertion bug (first reported in 2001? Can that be right?), but that's another story for another day.

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