Doty, no, Sparkle is visual only. I am convinced that a tool that is visual and jargon free can’t allow arbitrary HTML/CSS editing. And if the tool isn’t jargon free, or allows more advanced features only by editing HTML or CSS, it’s just a thin coat of paint over code and you still need to understand CSS positioning or browser bugs or even the concept of a CSS class, and what’s the point then?
There are plenty tools that try to mix visual editing and code, but as you have probably found they fall short on the visual side.
As to why a truly visual editor can’t allow arbitrary code editing, the reason is quite simple really. Take any non trivial technique, say an image gallery or animation or a lightbox. For each there are as many different techniques as you can count. Unlike a web browser that “executes” the page, an editor would have to understand the intent to go back to visual editing. The intent is never part of the page, and code acts in local fashion, so a change in one place can affect the layout or functionality in another. So to be truly visual an editor would have to understand all of the possible techniques. Finally many techniques are JavaScript based, code which is impossible to analyze by a piece of code for all practical purposes.
Now if you’re ok with an editor that doesn’t quite preview what the final result will be, there are plenty of options, they are essentially glorified web inspectors and expose all of it.
This difficulty in reconciliation of needs of code and visual use cases is incidentally the reason I think macaw 1 didn’t work out.
Duncan
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