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Once upon a time, not so long ago, web development apps were miserable. The folks responsible for all of the great text editors on the market, and there are several available for the Mac platform, did their part, but web design and development is not strictly about text editing. Much of layout and design is best handled visually, not because visual environments, like Dreamweaver or the new crop of apps that prompted me to write this post in the first place, are more efficient than editors, but because when people are involved efficiency is not necessarily the beginning and end of things. People are often more powerful and productive working with a GUI.

I might have been tempted to think that there will always be a few zealots who having grown up manually hacking together websites one page at a time will always insist that slogging through web development with a text editor and a browser to check their work is the only no compromise way to do it. I can only hope that by now there are very few of these people left. That approach has always been as clumsy as it is ineffective. I acknowledge that it was as a necessary, and at one time appropriate, first stage in the history of web development.

The early generations of visual design apps erred too far toward the myth of WYSIWYG. This was especially bad given the fact that the dust hadn't even begun to settle on the relevant standards and browser developers all but ignored what did exist in an attempt to differentiate what should have been a pretty straightforward type of app, given the general state of things. This was pre Ajax, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, XHTML; pre-almost everything that makes complex web design and development possible (Almost everything... Perl 5 was released in 1994!). Layout in these early apps was handled by infinitely nesting tables. It's true that one of your only true friends at that time was the text editor.

The current group of visual development apps combine the benefit of visual layout with real-time previews AND the power of modern text editors.

One of these applications, just released, Coda, by [panic] (http://www.panic.com/) describes itself as "one-window web development" and includes a text editor, full-featured sftp/webdav client, CSS editor, terminal, 'and more' all wrapped up in a very slick looking package. I Haven't played with the app enough to know whether they've actually succeeded in creating a one-window environment that works well. I am encouraged by their disclaimer,

• Unless you want to use more than one window. Which is totally cool.

I'll have more to say about Coda after I have a chance to play around with it for a bit. At first glance this may be what I had hoped Apple would have done with iWeb (and definitely did not do). I can say that panic's [Transmit] (http://www.panic.com/transmit/) is a mighty fine sftp/WebDav client (though I use CyberDuck instead) and Panic's apps always look really nice, due in no small part to a relationship they have with IconFactory, which means that their icons are always gorgeous.

There are two other apps I want to mention. The first is CSSEdit by MacRabbit, which is simply a great app. What it does, it does extremely well. There are a few nit-picky things here and there, for example when jumping between the editor and the palettes and other GUI devices they provide to let you select attributes, it seems as if changes don't carry between the two as immediately or consistently as might be ideal; but this is rarely an issue, or it's only a minor inconvenience and may have more to do with my habits than the app itself.

The best of CSSEdit is a feature called X-ray , which allows you to see both the rendered site and the structure of a site (as an overlay). Think Google Maps hybrid view. Within CSSEdit you can pull up a page in a window -it can be either a local page or a 'live' page out on the web- and then click on any element to place the element within the hierarchy of the structure of the site and overlay information related to layout, positioning, margins, padding, etc. It does all of this in a way that's easier to use than that last sentence is to read.

The second thing that it does very well is allow a designer to swap or 'override' stylesheets so that she can see the effect of changing the CSS of a page.

Coincidentally (?) MacRabbit released an update to CSSEdit today, the same day that panic released Coda. I haven't had time to play with the new version of CSSEdit either, but I'm very familiar with version 2 and assuming this 2.5 update improves in any way on what was already a great product, then I'm confident in saying that the new version is worth your time and money.

Finally, Adobe recently released Creative Suite and with it an updated version of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver 8 is already a very nice product and from what I know of [Dreamweaver CS3] (http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/), they've made improvements exactly where they were needed.

My understanding is there's significantly better support for CSS, including some "debugging" and optimization support, which is important because CSS and XHTML can still be a hack-ish sort of affair, standards or no.

More importantly, they've given up targeting IE6 or any other specific browser, in favor of adherence to standards, which is nice to see, both because I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do at this point, and also because it's good to see a vote for support of standards in a large mainstream commercial product like this.

There has never been a better time to be doing web design. The developers of these tools are doing their part, now everybody else start using them please, or freely available open source alternatives. (There are at least a couple of good ones.) But please lay off the gratuitous Ajax and stop making terribly unnecessary whizzy websites. Leave that to MTV2 types. The web is primarily about communication. The point is to get some sort of idea across in a clear and effective way. Please emphasize smart layout and clean code. Think print publication not contemporary art expo.