I have the HTML designer and the visual site designer. I would like to know:

If I design my site first in visual site designer and then open the documents in html designer and run the spell checker and save the document again in html editor, will that action add any unwanted code? I want my pages to be as clean as possible and also validates in the w3c validator.

Please do not suggest to enter the text first in html editor and do the spell checker first and then put the text in Visual site designer. Due to the design I need to be able to visualize how many words I can use around my design first and not the other way around.

The HTML Editor will change the markup if you view it in the visual mode.

I will have to then play around and see if the code that will add will make my page fail the w3c validator. Right now this is one of the biggest concern for me.

For the most part the HTML Editor is compliant with standards.

Here is my take on it. If most of the site is standards compliant for rendering and accessibility purposes, who cares if there is an error in a tag because of whatever syntax is used? The movie plays, the form displays, the link works. And nobody knows that such a horrible thing has occurred except the anal.

I agree a 100% with you. Now let me elaborate why I want it to be compliant. I am a die hard Dream Weaver user for years. DW even being a robust design package insert a lot of messy code on the pages that you have to clean up and even then it leaves non compliant pages. When I discovered VSD can do easilly I purchased the Visual Site Designer and the HTML editor. I want to create a fully compliant site for a specific sector that really cares about those superficial details. That's why I really want to keep the code as clean as possible.

I understand totally. I refuse to work on sites created with DW or any other WYSIWYG editor like Word because of all the crapola the editor adds. The only exception is EW3. It produces nice clean code.

I don't use the HTML Editor in visual mode so I don't know about the code it produces in WYSIWYG mode. I do know that it will change the code, though. Good luck.

Tom, your 0 for 2 with me today - what in the world. You know the reason we have compliance is not as much for today's use as tomorrows. With compliance comes at least a little insurance that tomorrow's coder will understand and/or be able to re-render new code from old code. You can't be missing tags and stuff. Also, just because it works today does not mean it will work tomorrow. To me its not anal is professional.

I am not talking about compliance in general or proper html tag useage. I'm talking about about little details on a page. The link to embed a Google map on a page will fail validation for example. Big deal? I think not. But that's my opinion.

I'm with Tom! just thought I'd throw that in....