I have been using Coffee Cup for HTML authoring for about 3 months now. I wanted to give it an honest effort and use it for more then just a simple webpage. I have found that it is able to deliver on most of its potential except for lacking WYSIWYG editing, somewhat quirky previewing and the lack of script execution when previewing the document.

As pages become more and more dynamic script execution in preview mode is essential.

As editing is done I often find that if I do not save my file before going into preview mode I am presented with an error indicating that a temp file can not be opened. There should be an "auto-save on preview" option (is there - I could not find it in the online help) to avoid this trouble.

And we all love WYSIWYG editing - perhaps this is in a newer or "higher level" package.

Some nice areas are the good samples and examples, decent templates and a pretty good HTML reference. On the downside is that sometimes when I view online help (which is HTML of course) a recently edited page will appear in the HTML help window and not the HTML help. I suppose this is a quirk in the HTML control ther are using - or something with my IE settings ... but since installing the tool this has been happening quite a bit and it is annoying.

However I prefer using projectcool.com or similar for HTML references anyway!

Its a decent tool - better then some, worse then others. It has an evaluation version which is very functional and not hobbled. There is a little yellow banner reminding you that you are not a paying customer but it is easily ignored. The commercial version is worth it for the extra samples and code snippets it provides. However most of the snippets are easily found online - but sometimes it is nice to get snippets that you have a higher degree of trust in (and that are somewhat documented!) - as a professional developer I don't mind writing my own code but I would imagine that for the novice developer the snippets would be invaluable.

So it has its problems - I'll probably leave it on my machine. I haven't found a compelling reason to delete it yet and since no other tool satisfies all my desires (yet) I will stick with those that do a good job and bounce around as necessary.






Recommended: Yes