Choosing the Right Format For Your Web Images
Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult?
JavaScript Guidelines and Best Practice
You are here: irt.org | Articles | Design | Web Page Creation [ previous next ]
Published on: Sunday 21st June 1998 By: Gary Ransom
Search the Newsgroups for discussions on Home Page authoring and one topic will appear more often than any other. Which is the best HTML editor?
But before entering into that debate, maybe a question needs to be asked - HTML editor, what's that?
O.K. let's start with the basics. The browser that you are probably using to view this page is a very complex and impressive piece of software. It can do all sorts of clever things but at its heart it's doing one particular thing. It's reading a text based file that has a number of extra commands added which tells the browser how to display the text, images if there are any, colours and fonts to use and so on. These extra commands are often referred to as HTML code (HyperText Mark up Language). Many people are put off by the thought of having to write computer code - and you can't blame them. The good news is that in the case of HTML the basics are very simple and it is quite possible to produce a basic page using just a handful of simple, easily understood "HTML tags". If you want to know more about HTML then follow the link to Joe Barta's page which you can find on my Home Page Guides page.
Now, if you know what HTML tags to use, then it is quite possible to write HTML with a simple text utility such as Notepad. Indeed many people do just that, though you could say that is a bit of a cranky way to do it (I can feel the hate mail coming already!).
There is an easier and in some ways better way, which is to use a purpose built HTML editor.
There are literally scores of HTML editors available and at least one will suit your particular needs. Ideally you should try several and then decide which you like best. Here's some advice to save you some time (after all that's why you're reading this guide isn't it?):
The first thing to remember is that no HTML editor can do anything that you couldn't do yourself with a simple text editor. What an HTML editor is designed to do is make the process easier and/or quicker.
So, starting at one end of the scale there are basic text editors and at the other are full WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors with every conceivable bell and whistle. My advice is to choose a middle course - using a text editor is a very purist approach and appeals to a certain kind of computer enthusiast (I'm being deliberately careful here. Who needs hate mail?) whereas using a WYSIWYG HTML editor, in my experience, hides too much from you and it can be an absolute pain to get one to present the page exactly how you would like it to appear. Possibly of secondary importance is that the further down the scale you go the less expensive these tools are. As an example, there are a number of free utilities that are more than sophisticated enough for all but the most advanced user. WYSIWYG editors on the other hand, or at least the ones that are any good, tend to be big bucks.
For me, the questions to ask are: is the software affordable, is it easy to learn and easy to use, has it enough functionality to cater for all levels of use. One that comes up trumps for all these criteria is Homesite.
This excellent software is available in basic form as freeware and the above link will download a copy for you. An improved version is also available though it is shareware and you will have to pay to keep it beyond a certain time/usage limit. You can download a copy from Allaire. I can also recommend Web-it! and Web-O-Rama. Both of these are freeware and like Homesite, make writing HTML a fairly simple process.
You might wish to consider an alternative approach, particularly if you are familiar and happy with a word processor package. Many of the newer word processor packages offer a utility to convert a document created with the package to HTML. If your version is a bit too old for this then chances are that there will be a free add-on utility available that will do this, either from the manufacturer's web page or from one of the many software sites that are on the web. Bear in mind though that like most WYSIWYG editors, these document converters, as they are known, tend to make annoying changes to the page that you've designed. Almost inevitably you'll be forced to adjust the HTML by hand and what's the point in that?
Lastly, you may have been given some sort of Home Page Wizard by your web space provider. These tend to be a combined WYSIWYG type editor and an FTP program to upload your pages to the server. In my (limited) experience these really are the worst of all worlds and just don't work at all well. However, in the interests of impartiality you could try AOLpress which has received some good reviews and despite its name should work with any ISP, not just AOL.
If you've tried my recommendations and don't like them then drop back to the Other Software article and follow the links to the web software sites and see what you can find.
Next Other Software...
>Choosing the Right Format For Your Web Images
Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult?
JavaScript Guidelines and Best Practice
Netscape and mozilla.org give birth to Gecko