I have been using the BBEdit development platform for some time now. Several years in fact. But, I only came to this after using several others before and during that time. Remember Allaire’s Homesite? I used it. Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Eclipse? I used them all. The most recent tryout was given to Panic’s good looking Coda development platform. They all have strengths/weaknesses. No one can be the “Best of” if there is always another feature or process that works in another product.
The real problem is when you have created a site and then want to manage it in another IDE (Integrated Development Environment). If you used the templating features of some tool, they don’t translate into another. Used their “special markup” features? Better hope it’s a web standard. What really makes it hard is when you have someone who is not a hand coder (all of us, proudly raise your hand) and they have only used a WYSIWYG editor. These editors tend to add additional code that may work, but really obfuscates what you are doing. I call it Code Bloat. It’s really ugly when you have to fix these sites.
What’s the best way to combat this? Well, ideally, hand coding. But if that is not possible (and really, why do you have to since you already paid good money for an editor), it’s best to use only strict XHTML. Don’t use any of the cutesy stuff. It may work for now, but someone else may have to deal with it later.