Tools
October 20, 1999
You'll need various tools to create a web site - most obviously,
some means by which to create HTML.
Other than writing it by hand using a text editor,
there's basically three ways to do that:
- create it using a 'WYSIWYG' HTML editor.
- modify a page template using an editor.
- generate it from files or a database using software.
HTML Editors
Probably the most popular method is to use an HTML editor.
Some are 'point-and-click' WYSIWYG environments in which you can
create simple or sophisticated web pages with little or no knowledge
of HTML, while others - such as those listed here -
require at least some knowledge of HTML or will help you learn it,
and give you the satisfaction of having complete,
hands-on control of your web page.
Many of the WYSIWYG editors generate dreadful code that you're better
off never looking at, except to see how bad it can get...
Tip!
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When you visit any of the following links, take a look at their
source code. The page should have been generated with the product
itself (else what good is it if they don't use it for their own site?).
You might also validate it at W3C to see
how far from the (de facto) standards it is.
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Evrsoft.com's
1st Page 2000
includes full support for WebTV, ASP, SSI, Cold Fusion, DHTML,
Javascript/VBScript properties, HTML 4.0 and 450 free Javascripts.
A very professional and fully-featured product, you have to wonder
why its free; perhaps its to establish the product before charging
for it. Recommended!
HTML-Kit
is a free and easy to use Windows program designed to help HTML
authors to edit, format, validate, preview and publish web pages.
Beginners can benefit from letting it point out errors and suggest
improvements to the code.
Experts can save time spent on common tasks using the customizable
and extendible editor while maintaining full control over the code.
For more freeware HTML editors, see:
Frewware32.com's
HTML editor page,
or
Moocher's
HTML editors page.
Stroud's Consummate Internet Apps List
offers several shareware HTML editors that you can download and try to
see if you like them.
Stroud's reviews all of the programs and lists their features.
HTML Preprocessors
HTML preprocessors scan an input file for commands that instruct
them to do such things as include the contents of another file at
this point, or substitute all occurences of some specially-marked
abbreviation with a longer text, etc.
They're most useful when you have a lot of pages that you want to
share stylistic elements (e.g. standard headers, navigation menu,
and footer), or you're more comfortable with straight text-editing
than with GUI interfaces when creating text files such as HTML.
Personally, I use xh,
so called because it generates
XHTML
(as well as HTML 4).
Xh allows you to write web content with minimal markup
( example ).
It abbreviates commonly-used markup such as links, lists, paragraphs,
etc, so that the text is much less cluttered.
It's very simple to use, and effectively constitutes a new,
simpler markup language - XHML.
The xh preprocessor converts XHML to XHTML (or HTML 4),
adding any 'boilerplate' such as navigation menus, banners, footers,
etc.
It's a succesor to WDVL's
ht.
htmlpp
is another, more sophisticated pre-processor for HTML documents.
It generates pages, headers, footers, contents, cross-links,...
Its purpose is to simplify the work of writing and packaging large
numbers of HTML documents. It acts like a compiler:
you provide an input source text and htmlpp produces the HTML documents
from that. This is easier and safer than trying to edit and manage
separate HTML documents. To use htmlpp,
you should be comfortable writing HTML without help from a special
HTML editor.
Copyright
How To Build a Web Site with Free Stuff Table of Contents
Page Templates
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