Quanta
Backstory... I've been mucking about with WordPress 1.5 for a new project, and while I like the new features in WordPress it seems to me that it makes a bunch of unneccessary calls to the mysql server whenever it sets up a page. So I've been mucking about with Wordpress templates, trying to streamline the design in order to minimize the amount of database activity required to serve a page.
That, and I found the default theme used by wordpress to be unnecessarily complicated, with far too many damn styles in the stylesheet. The stylesheet I use is also needlessly complex (I'm going to have to do a second pass on everything) but it's still a damn sight better than what was there before.
All of this has been hampered by a general lack of knowledge of mysql and php (and not much time to learn either), and a tendency for WordPress to "assume" that some information it calls will automatically be formatted a certain way.
-- Tangent --
That really pisses me off in some instances. For example, the php database call that inserts your links list into a page inserts the link like so:
< li > < h2 >Links:< /h2 > < /li >
...
Which makes it IMPOSSIBLE to use that function and have valid xhtml 1.1.
-- End of Tangent --
At any rate, all this mucking about with a site using all that php has made it difficult to do what I usually do, which is fire up a WYSIWYG program like Dreamweaver or nvu to format the page... because that tends to cause all sorts of problems. Also, the fact that I'm actually stripping *out* styles from the original theme means I have to be in the code itself. So I've been re-familiarizing myself with the Ye Olde Web Building By Hande method of web design.
-- Tangent --
And it's funny, after going through all that... I'm starting to prefer it. I liked using the WYSIWYG tools because I could never visualize what the page would look like just by looking at the code -- and I'm starting to be able to do that now. And I'm *also* finding that being able to control the way the *code* looks, as well as the appearance of that code in a browser, makes it easier for me to change specific bits of a site as necessary, because it's easier to find everything.
-- End of Tangent --
At any rate, this brings me to Quanta, which is a KDE web design tool (probably a general-purpose programming tool, but it has a lot of web-specific features.) It looks like they took kate and built a development evironment around it. Anyway, I've been using it a lot as I work on this site, and the more I use it the more I like it. It keeps track of my div tags, it color codes specific tags so I can tell whether or not I've improperly closed them, and when indented text wraps at the end of the screen, it preserves that indent on the next line.
And it loads fast, and it plays nice with my browsers (which nvu won't do without modifying an xml script you have to download as a plugin).
I'm thinking of using it to take another pass at ubersoft.net, to fix a few things I had to kludge when I redid it to be more navigation friendly last year. Heck, I'm pretty close to just using it for anything design related I want to do.
