So... just wondering (question re: WYSIWYG web editors)

[Rath Darkblade]

Sigh. Is it possible to get the old version of Dreamweaver somewhere (legally, of course)? Or must I plump for a fat, overinflated Adobe price?

[DeadPoolX]

It's highly unlikely you could legally find an older copy of Dreamweaver online. It might be possible on eBay or someplace like that, but you'd run the risk of purchasing it from someone who might not include the access key.

Fortunately, there are some free (and legal) alternatives:

• Open Element
• Bluefish
• Google Web Designer (beta)
• Kompozer

I'd like to point out that I have no idea how good ANY of these are, so you'll either have to try them each on your own or look up information yourself.

[Maxor127]

Notepad is all you really need.

[audiodane]

I have always heard of wysiwyg in reference to HTML, not plain documents. For a word processor, I do prefer Word, especially since the docx format.

As a child of the 80's and TRS-80 and 8088's, wysiwyg was a big deal when it came to Microsoft platforms. Growing up with DOS, we used LEWP (leading edge word processor) .. I don't remember a whole lot about it, but that and whatever we used before it was not wysiwyg. As I recall, if you wanted to bold something, you could go back with your cursor and select the word and invoke a menu of sorts to select highlighting (bold, underline, etc). The text I believe would then be drawn in inverted ascii (black on white background), but was all still 80x24 columnar text mode. I wonder if I still have any 5.25's with LEWP on them.

It would be awesome if it could run in DOSBox! I'll have to look around. I'll have to ask my dad what we used before that, because I know there was something. We was a big dBase guy, and used it for many years before MS Access finally came along. For small and local-only databases, Access was pretty good. But I digress..

When WYSIWYG finally came along (in our house, at least), it was a really big deal. Writing book reports for class became a lot easier.. I even remember what a big deal it was when I used my first footnote in a report. I believe that was in MSWord for WfW311 at that point. I don't recall for sure though.

All this was the mid to late 80's.. I started a BBS when I was about 12, so that was '89. This was all way before that. Had to be around '87, I would have been 10ish, around 4th grade or so.. Not many other kids were typing up reports then-- but my dad both insisted and encouraged it in our house. Reviews and revisions were a nightmare however, he was (and still is) a stickler for proper grammar and punctuation, as well as clarity of thought. It taught me well, however, to place importance on the words I choose and how I write. There are many times where I must consciously choose to ignore my dad's voice in my head to go back and correct something, because "it's just a text/forumpost/email."

Anyhoo, that's MY context for wysiwyg.. Now I need to go do some searching on VetusWare..
..dane

[Rath Darkblade]

I remember LEWPs. The first word processor I used was First Choice for DOS (this was in the very early 90s), and I quickly moved on to WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS. I also used Harvard Graphics to create and print graphs - this was way back when WfW3.11 was still the latest and greatest.

Does anyone remember First Choice? I wonder what happened to it. I can't find any mention of it online.

[BBP]

No, but I remember Harvard Graphics with a fondness... wonder if I still have the "art" I made with it?