Probably the most popular method of creating web pages 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...
An HTML editor saves you from having to learn HTML and typing <pointy bracket stuff />. They will usually provide you with the quickest, easiest way to get your site up. Still, I recommend you to at least try making your first page 'by hand', so that you'll have a better idea of what your web editor is doing. This may be useful if, for example, you can't get it to do exactly what you want, and you can then look at the code generated and diagnose and fix the problem. But be aware, some editors generate awfully bloated code, and few of them gnenerate standard HTML.
| 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. |
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 full-featured editor and an integrated development environment designed to help HTML, XML and script authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Newcomers to web page development can benefit from letting it point out errors and provide suggestions on how to create standards compliant pages. Experts can save time spent on common tasks using the highly customizable and extensible editor while maintaining full control over more than dozen supported file types including HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB, C/C++/C#, Delphi/Pascal, Lisp, SQL, and more.
For more freeware HTML editors, see: 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.
Here are some more popular web editors:
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.
Elated's web toolbox
contains pagekits, which are
free pre-designed, pre-programmed page templates that you may download
(in .zip format),
and alter to build your own page from scratch (graphics included).
Pagekits are entire website templates,
with all the code and images you need to get started with a great page.
They are free to use;
all Elated ask is that you mention them and put a link to the
Elated Web Toolbox somewhere on your site.
Having built your page or pages, by whatever means, you might think that having looked at the results in one or two browsers, on one or two different platforms, and having seen nothing wrong - you're all set to publish them. However, this isn't always the case; there's many more than just two browsers and two platforms; not only that, but there's several versions of the several browsers, and having a page look OK in one version is no guarantee that it'll look OK in the other versions. There's no sure-fire way to guarantee that your pages are good under all circumstances, but using some of the various page checkers and validators can help reduce the potential problems.
HTML-Kit
(described above, under HTML Editors)
can check pages using Tidy, or the CSE HTML validator.
The W3C HTML Validation Service
is very useful if you want to write "standard" HTML;
I recommend it.