About
HTML
Editors
About
HTML
Editors
Some tips and many opinions from Kathy Amen
| No one learning HTML these days will have to do what I did, and construct many of their first pages using straight, "raw" HTML and their word processors. HTML editors are so much more easily and cheaply available now, coming with most browser and word processing programs' latest versions. But my HTML apprenceship, I feel, has stood me in good stead, and I still feel very strongly that learning basic HTML coding, so you can function without an editor, if necessary, is important. I'll enumerate some specific reasons for this feeling below. |
But which editor to use? I must admit that I have very limited experience with different editors, but that doesn't stop me from holding very strong opinions about what an editor should and should not be able to do for you. Some general things to look for (and avoid):
Dreamweaver is my current editor and is pretty much considered state-of-the-art, at least for the time being (written in fall, 2004). NOTE: I began using Dreamweaver MX 2004, which is substantially different from earlier versions; I have no experience with the earlier versions.
This is a really great program, very powerful but also easy to use (at least once you get the hang of it). Its educational version isn't even all that expensive ($100 or less) considering what it can do. I like that it is very easy to move between WYSIWYG and HTML code interfaces, and that there are a number of time-saving features in both modes. In particular, it makes creating and applying styles a breeze. It can be a bit intimidating for beginners, but there are lots of good books and websites available to help you get familiar with it. Among the former, I particularly like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Demystified by Laura Gutman (in the Library at TK5105.8885.D74 G886 2004). And here are a couple of websites with tutorials and other good Dreamweaver information:
Want to see if Dreamweaver is worth the $$? Macromedia offers a 30-day free trial.
The "publish to HTML" functions that come with most word processors and spreadsheets these days are very handy, particularly for converting existing documents to HTML. But they do seem to put a lot of unnecessary tags in the HTML, cluttering it up and, sometimes, altering the appearance in mysterious ways. I say by all means use these time savers to convert existing content, but don't rely on them as your only way of generating HTML. NOTE: Dreamweaver has a wonderful "clean up Word HTML" function that gets rid of a lot of the extra garbage Word and Excel put into HTML documents. It doesn't get all of it, though.
If you have the browser versions that include editing functions, try them out, but do be aware of some issues that I have seen in connection with them. For one thing, they, understandably, skew their coding to what that particular browser likes to see. Sometimes this is "good" HTML and sometimes it's not. For simple displays, Netscape and Explorer and everyone else are all the same. But the fancier you get, the more careful you must be about cross-browser compatibility. You don't want to limit readership or appreciation of your pages only to users of one type of browser. Another problem I have seen with these editors is their unpredictability. Sometimes they insert spacing, tabling, etc. where you don't really want it. If they give you the option of editing the HTML (or source) code easily, this isn't such a problem, but if direct editing of the HTML is cumbersome, you're in for a lot of hassles.
Tucows.com and nonags.com have all kinds of cheap and/or free software with ratings by users.
I happily used AOLPress for many years and I still feel like it does pretty much everything you need an editor to do, without its doing a lot of stuff you don't want it to do. If you know someone with a copy, you can get it from them, but it is no longer available from aolpress.com, where I downloaded it. (It's a testament to the simplicity of this program that you can just copy it, it doesn't have to be installed. Ah, yes, takes me back to the simple old DOS days.... but I digress.) It does have a few limitations which are of concern, and which will become more problematic. New, or relatively new, features, such as CSS, are not supported by the software, and it complies with the HTML 2.0 standard, but no higher. This puts some of its defaults at odds with the newer web standards. For example, the new XHMTL standards require tags to be in lower case and AOLPress makes them all upper. (For more information on XHTML, see this explanation from the W3Schools folks.) For these reasons, plus the fact that a copy of Dreamweaver became available to me and it's a really great program (see above) I have bid a fond farewell to AOLPress.
With editors so cheaply and easily available, why learn HTML at all, you may ask? I have some philosophical reasons for you, and some practical ones. First, the philosophical. It's very satisfying, I think, to create something as professional-looking (even snazzy) as a web page from such simple stuff as the HTML coding tags. But beyond this, HTML editors are like language translation programs. If you were involved in delicate diplomatic negotiations, would you want to trust one of these programs to translate your words correctly? Your web page vision is no less deserving of clear expression.
Now, some practical reasons.
