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 General discussion of site Learning HTML Planning and building Going live HTML editors Web development resources Ongoing skills development Web databases      |
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HTML editors
A variety of HTML editors are available to simplify the process of developing web pages. "WYSIWYG" (What You See is What You Get) editors enable you to create and edit web pages without typing in all the HTML codes manually. Although you can use these editors without knowing any HTML, a basic knowledge of HTML can give you greater control over your pages. For example, most free WYSIWYG HTML editors don't include all the features you might want to include in your page, and sometimes it's just plain quicker to correct or insert a line of code yourself. This section looks at: Both Microsoft and Netscape offer free WYSIWYG editors with their version 4 browsers, FrontPage Express (a scaled-down version of the commercial MS FrontPage) and Netscape Composer (part of the Communicator browser suite). These products are available from the Microsoft and Netscape web sites; alternatively a number of computer magazines come with CD-ROMS containing these and other web development tools. Microsoft Internet Explorer: (for FrontPage Express) Netscape Communicator: (for Netscape Composer) Among the many editing packages commercially available are Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Webmonkey Builder.com Word processors and HTML editing Many of the latest word processing packages allow pages to be saved as HTML, automatically doing the HTML markup. While this can be a time-saving device, the conversion often leaves a lot to be desired. As the World Wide Web Consortium explains: "Many filters from word-processing packages, and also some HTML authoring tools, generate HTML code which is completely contrary to the design goals of the language. What they do is to look at a document almost purely from the point of view of layout, and then mimic that layout in HTML by doing tricks with FONT, BR and (non-breaking spaces). HTML documents are supposed to be structured around items such as paragraphs, headings and lists. Yet some of these documents barely have a paragraph tag in sight! The problem comes when the content of pages needs to be updated, or given a new layout, or re-cast in XML (which is now to be the new mark-up language). With proper use of HTML, such operations are not difficult, but with a muddle of non-structural tags it's quite a different matter; maintenance tasks become impractical." <http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/> Useful self-instructional tutorials on developing web pages with Netscape Composer are
available from California State University
http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/composer.html
and Xavier University of Louisiana: Bruce Lane's online guide to developing basic web pages with
FrontPage Express can be found at:
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