I really like Expression Web, when it doesn’t crash. It generates standard-compliant XHTML, it’s pleasant to use, etc. But I’ve had it crash many times. It crashes when I have too many files open, or when I edit too big a file for too long.
I need to find something better, but I haven’t taken the time to evaluate other HTML editing environments. I’d like to keep using it if Microsoft would fix the crashes. They have posted an update, but the description implies it doesn’t fix the problems I’ve seen.
How can a Microsoft product generate XHTML when IE does not support XHTML??????
I’ve found that Visual Studio 2008 is a much superior (X)HTML development environment in general than Expression. I’ll bet one of the free Express products would probably fulfill your needs. I did my whole web site with 2008. It happily handles .html pages properly, supports java very well and has excellent style sheet tools, including a css mapper that displays which style(s) a component is using. I honestly haven’t found any function that Expression performs better than VS 2008. (I’m sure someone will prove me wrong.)
I use Visual Studio 2008 regularly, but I haven’t tried it as an HTML editor. I was irritated by how an earlier version of Visual Studio handled HTML, but that’s been a while and the product has changed quite a bit since then. I need to give it another chance.
For what it’s worth, you are not alone with your experience of Expression Web crashing frequently in ordinary use, with no obvious cue from which to try reproducing. By frequently, I mean that I’ve had well over a dozen crashes in six months – which is very many more than I have ever had with any other program.
A recurring cause is of accessing memory (often to call a virtual function) that has been released. Another, which I have debugged (and explain at my website), is a deadlock from doing too much in a DllMain function.
I suspect that both types of trouble are much exaggerated by multi-processor execution, which does bring very much more opportunity to expose synchronisation bugs. Why Expression Web should be more susceptible to this than are other programs, I don’t know.
Since Expression Web has so many features which are clearly buggy even if they don’t crash, I incline to dismiss the thing as bad software that ought never have got as far as a commercial release.