HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Celebrity Interview: Eric Meyer

Eric Meyer has been working with the web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and Web standards. The widely read author of Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders), Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates), and CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference (Osborne/McGraw-Hill), he is also the founder of Complex Spiral Consulting, which counts among its clients America On-Line, Apple Computer, Inc., Wells Fargo Bank, and Macromedia.

1. What OS/platform do you primarily develop in?

Mac OS X; I’m using Tiger on one machine, and Panther on another.

2. What’s your (X)HTML editor of choice for coding websites?

BBEdit.

3. How did you decide on this as your primary editor?

I’ve been using it since roughly forever, and I like its combination of raw texty goodness and powerful features. I know people criticize its lack of code-folding, but I’ve never had much need for code folding. I like to be able to see all my CSS and (X)HTML with pretty syntax coloring. I’d probably feel differently if I were writing a lot of JavaScript or PHP or Ruby or whatever. I also have less than no use for code completion in CSS, so its absence in BBEdit is actually a plus for me.

4. What’s the one (or more) feature of the software you couldn’t live without?

The fact that it stays out of my way and lets me do my thing. That and regular expressions in search-and-replace. I could live without almost everything else, including syntax coloring, although I wouldn’t enjoy it.

5. If you were in charge of choosing new features for this piece of software, what feature(s) would you add?

Better drag-and-drop support in the document drawers. I’d really like to be able to drag a document occupying its own window into the drawer of another window, and have it get ‘sucked in.’ I also want to be able to rearrange the order of documents in the drawer by dragging them around. If either one is possible already, then I sure as heck can’t figure out how.

6. Bonus Unrelated Question: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers [.com|.ca] by Mary Roach. I read the chapter “Beyond the Black Box,” which is about plane crashes and their effects on human bodies, on a flight back from Iceland in April. That was fun.

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