In the past, I've done all my HTML authoring in a plain text editor. (This doesn't include all HTML pages exported from content I've written in FrameMaker or Word.) Fancier tools didn't seem worth the trouble. But hacking out HTML by hand just won't cut it any more; not for any serious amount of content. I could get away with it for a few pages, but I want to use techniques I can apply in serious projects.
So I've resolved to do all my static HTML in a serious editing environment. But which one? It has to be something that generates clean, simple HTML without a lot of effort on my part. That eliminates all the popular WYSIWYG editors (such as the one in Open Office), which tend to generate really complicated HTML. It also lets out the popular web site builders (such as Dreamweaver and Expression Web) which try to cater to every need of the sophisticated web developer — and introduce a lot of complexity in the process.
KompoZer looked promising. This is yet another attempt to revive the Composer element in Netscape, which the Mozilla Foundation has shamefully neglected. The current version actually generates decent HTML (Composer did not), and there's a passable CSS editor. But it still has more rough edges than I can live with.
Most of the remaining editors are just enhanced text editors. There's HTML auto-completion, and an easy way to observe how your editing affects the document. But I want more functionality than that.
I finally settled on <oXygen/>. Silly trademark aside, it's a solid tool, with good editing modes for both raw text and WYSIWYG. Of course it's overkill, being a full-fledged XML development environment (with a price to match). But the learning curve is not an issue: the XHTML support is nicely modularized. Neither is the cost, since I need a proper XML authoring tool anyway.