1 Expression Web is probably overkill for your needs, but I bet all the modern commercial tools are equally so.  It should be capable of producing sites that don't use silverlight code, and if it doesn't, there wouldn't be a requirement that the server have silverlight on it, there is no server runtime, you'd just have to have the embedded link to the client runtime so any visitors could get it if they didn't have it. But that seems unlikely to be necessary, since you're not likely to be putting silverlight controls in your pages.
Pixy is about to release a massive upgrade to the Minx editors, btw.

2 My friends-and-family price for Expression Studio Web Professional is way, way below retail, if you want to give it a shot. The Silverlight requirement is definitely for the application itself, not the generated pages; it can generate perfectly normal HTML/CSS-based pages.

-j

3

Based on what you said above, the Express version of Visual Studio (web developer) will probably work for you.

4 Well, the price is certainly right. I'm installing it now, and we'll see. (But it sure wants to install a lot of other crud. What in hell is it doing with SQL?)

5 I think it's going to take all night to load. Almost two hours now, and it's working on #4 out of 18 packages to install.

6 Or until I notice that it's got a restart popup...

7 Have you ever tried Dreamweaver? Any opinion on it?

8 For plain Generic HTML, I use the free NVu.

9

It installs sql, I believe, because it uses a database to store, among other things, autocomplete information. It's kind of overkill if all you want to do is edit a web page, but it's a really nice editor.

 

10 Oh, one thing--you will find that VS likes to work in the context of projects, given it's origins.  You don't have to make one, though--you can just open a plain old html file. 

11

I noticed that. There didn't seem to be any obvious way to directly compose a normal HTML file, but I didn't really look at it all that long.

I'm thinking I should probably stick with Frontpage. I know its crochets now, and when I stay away from a few flaws, it works adequately.

I did updates today, and with VS installed it took almost an hour for all the patches to update. This machine got 21 patches. The other machine, without VS installed, only got 7.

12

That's the project-orientation coming through. I normally just use File|Open and right-click and create a new file in the dialog, or create a new file in Explorer or something first.

You got a ton of patches because even though it's been out for like 3 years, they don't ship the latest version:  you have to download the original version, then apply a service pack, as well as various updates.

If it's not to your taste, that's fine.  I have to write HTML sometimes for my day job, and it's my preferred tool.