The CoffeeCup HTML editor was the company’s first product in 1996, developed apparently to help write a website for the aforementioned coffee house. The product is available as a free trial with a $49 licence fee beyond the trial period. The product provides two distinct editing facilities, a WYSIWYG editor and a code editor.
The visual editor provides a facility for page development for those without prior experience of HTML. It allows drag and drop page development.
Screenshot of the visual editor 
Opening an existing page in the visual editor warns that the visual editor may optimise the code to optimise drag and drop features. This normally means generating bloated and non-standards compliant code. However, in spite of this warning, code generated by the visual editor appears to be pretty well behaved.
However, the code editor is a much more powerful tool and the rest of this review will focus upon this.
The code editor gives the developer complete control over the HTML. However, it also provides a range of facilities that enhance productivity and quickly become invaluable to the experienced user.
Nine menus are provided
1. The File menu provides file handling functions, Open, Close Save Etc.
2. The Edit menu provides Copy and Paste, and Find and Replace, but also Strip HTML and case conversion
3. The Views menu provides access to the tab screens providing shortcuts to special characters, and a range of other useful resources including code snippets
4. The Document menu provides a quick way to edit document properties including colour schemes and a convert to XHTML facility for older pages
5. The Insert menu provides shortcuts to insert many HTML tags eg links, tables and so on
6. The Format menu provides shortcuts to insert many HTML tags that control formatting eg font style and paragraph alignment
7. The tools menu has a wide range of tools allowing you to clean up code, check spelling and crucially tailor the editor using the preferences option.
8. The Window menu allows to switch between the open windows
9. The Help menu provides access to the help facilities, much of which are provided online and so require an Internet connection.
The editor allows you to switch between editing and preview mode (shown below) which allows you to see the results of your editing, but it also allows you to open the page in a range of browsers to test the results.
Preview mode
I have used the CoffeeCup HTML editor for about four years. It has proved to be a reliable tool in use and provides a range of time-saving facilities that I miss when using plain text editors. The continuous refinement has led to a highly polished product. For example, the new code completion feature in the 2008 version improves both speed and reliablity of coding.
It does have a few quirks, including a slight bias towards Internet Explorer, which whilst excusable in terms of IE’s market share are irritating to standards-conscious developers. In order to make the best use, it is necessary to use some of its less obvious features which I shall explore in a subsequent article.
