Recommended HTML editor?

Does anyone have a (preferably free) GUI tool they recommend for really simple HTML editing?

As BlogMom ’round these parts, and also resident tech geek, it isn’t a surprise that I personally am most comfortable writing my posts in HTML. But many of the experts here are far better known for their management wisdom or their journalism savvy. They were weaned on Word, which as you probably know really stinks for posting on the Web (even into this handy little editor). Saying “save as text and then paste into the A&O editor, and format all your bullets and bold text all over again” was a suggestion that, er, was not met with great enthusiasm. Gosh.

Anyone who has been bonked on the head with my magic You Are An Expert wand can also post messages in HTML, however. Yet my suggestion that they use a (gasp) text editor in which to write their blog posts and use HTML reminded me that not everybody wants to learn HTML.

One friend was kind enough to point me at a page with a list of free editor tools, some of which are WYSIWYG. I’ve poked at a few of them; some are impressive full-scale editors, which is overkill for the purpose. Others have the basic functionality but don’t work especially well (one, for example, blockquoted the whole document rather than the paragraph). But I’m sure there are others worth mentioning… and that my gang isn’t the only folks who could use the advice.

This request is specific to Windows at the moment, largely because I just discovered a spiffy new feature on the Mac. In TextEdit, you can set the preferences to XHTML Strict; thereafter, saving as HTML will create far better code than I could write.—Esther