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What's the first question about page editors? Simple.
Two words. Quo animo? Roughly translated it means, for what purpose? The answer brings one to a bifurcation in one's path. There are two answers. On the one hand there is some form of E-commerce, something you have to to sell., a product or a service. On the other hand there is anything else. Let's consider the first case. E-commerce, selling a product or service. You may go to work for some company which engages in E-commerce. In this circumstance you will use whatever webpage editing applications which that company uses to make web pages. Period. End of discussion. Everybody will be singing from the same page in their hymnals and all the ducks will be in a row. Working in a commercial setting is the best way to learn on the job as it were the things which go into the design and production of commercial web pages. Altenatively, you may be an individual who decides to independently market a product or service on the internet. This circumstance involves more flexibility as to what can be done and more uncertainty as to how one must proceed. There is good news as well as bad. The good news is that E-commerce has become much more standardized, secure and simplified than it was previously. The bad news is that some individuals attempt to create the E-commerce aspects of a website on their own. It would be all but impossible for those without degrees in computer science. Not easy, but possible in extremely rare cases if you had a degree in computer science. But even so, you should not do this and in fact you shouldn't waste time even thinking about doing this. There is re-inventing the wheel. And there is re-inventing the space shuttle. If you can't be dissuaded from making the attempt on your own you will eventually come to know all the ifs, ands, and buts about programming, maintenance, security, promotion, credit cards, and etc. So what should the would be individual entrepreneur do? You can have
some control over the look and feel of your site by creating the basic design and
layout of pages yourself. Then you can use a company providing e-commerce
functionality to websites. You can do this a couple of ways. If you are in a
hurry, for somewhere between $150 and $1,500 you can get a simple website made
and placed on your server. One Buddycom member paid an autosite creating service
to make a basic site. Afterwhich BBedit and Dreamweaver were used to make
modifications and updates to the basic site. The site was simple. Although it was a
commercial site it didn't need the all important shopping cart nor was it necessary to
process credit cards online. The site was up and running in no time flat.
The service company which charged $139 for a five page website was Network
Solutions, a Verisign company, the webcenter which registers your web
domain names.
CNET Website builder Service. CNET has a service for creating
websites which costs $49 dollars per year. After you sign up you can
access convenient web based page making tools to create a website. |
E-commerce, more than just software. You have something to sell. You have
a product or a service. You want to use the internet to promote and sell that product or service. And plenty of
people out there who would love to buy it. Why do it the hard, expensive, unsecure way?
Why waste money? Why worry about any of the little details? Why waste time? You never
wanted to be a computer programmer anyway, did you? Yahoo! store. Two words. Real
simple. |
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Making webpages is fun. Or could be. Or should be. But there still
is lacking one crucial component to web page creation. STANDARDIZATION. Computer
software. Webpage editors. It's been a learning experience. Like reformed
software-aholics we have become much more conservative in our attitude towards
software. There is no perfect page editor because of a lack of standardization.
But the situation is vastly improved over what it was just five years ago. Sometimes it seems the people who make browsers always want to keep you guessing. So they sometimes agree on how they want to write code and then they sometimes change things around and sometimes they add new things. The people who make web page editors, the software applications with which web pages are made and then changed around, like that way of doing things, too. There are so many differences in the way that the web languages, or codes, for making web pages can be written. There are many, many differences in the way the code can be interpreted by the browser applications as well. This situation has remained a constant feature of the internet since the internet began. It may come as no surprise that we really like this constant feature of the internet. It's not so much that we like constancy, but rather that we like variety. So many of the websites on the web are so uniform. But that is so dull, tedious and boring, don't you think? Wouldn't it be nice to find a site where the fonts or the layouts of the pages were not all exactly alike? Or at least where the meaning of the text were as important as the size of the text. In Japan especially a webpage is almost synonymous with text. Text, text, text. You'd think the internet was just a fancy electronic replacement for books. Sometimes it seems the major purpose for CSS is to cram more text into a page and make text so small you can barely read it. The solution? Always keep several browsers and several page editors around somewhere. If you want to see blinky text, use Netscape. If you get tired of blinky text, switch to Explorer. If you get tired of a cool form on your page, no problem, just open the page in another editor and save it. This works for all the editors except CoffeeCup, but hopefully that may change in a later version. You may use just one of the popular page editors and because everyone everywhere always sees what they are supposed to see, the way they are supposed to see it, you never suspect that the code it creates for you is not valid. That's what the validation checker is for in some of these editors. Of course, if you have a problem with or just get tired of "valid" tags or scripts, you guessed it, try opening the page in another editor and save it once. Wysiwyg is really wysialmostwyg. HoTMetal Pro and DreamWeaver might be wysivctwyg. CoffeeCup may be wywiwyg. But the people who make browsers won't let you down here. If variety is the spice of life, they certainly don't want you to forget it. The PNG image format is a great example. It would seem to be the best image format for the web since sliced bread. So why haven't you seen one lately? There's too much variety in how you should write the code in your page editor to get the darn PNG images seen. For more confusing information you can go to PC World or CNET and search for PNG. You'll find lots of editorials explaining this silly PNG coding and implimentation problem. For example, this article by Paul Anderson, "Tag Mania, Make pages go PNG." The article was written several years ago and the situation hasn't changed. We attended some staff meetings of living, warm-bodied people in the cubicles of some well known technology companies in Palo Alto, Cupertino, Los Altos and other venues in the venerated Silicon Valley. One editorial writer explained that she never creates the aesthetically pleasing layouts for the pages which contain her writing because that's someone else's job. If she had had to worry with the nuts and bolts of coding and layout for her editorials she couldn't have remembered the message she had intended to convey. That may be true. Or maybe it's just an excuse to cover up for a lack of genetic superiority. If this all seems like nonsense to you, just remember two things. Nobody uses perfect HAL 9000 computers yet. Variety encourages creativity. Universal standards might be convenient but think of all the folks who would be out of a job. The more of these apparently senseless "if ands and buts," you can stuff into your repertoire, the more reason you can give your colleagues to believe that you are truly the walking one and only, Ms. or Mr. WebGuru.
CNET reviews WSIWYG Editors
CoffeeCup is available for Windows. It is both a source code editor and a WYSIYG editor. As you add a tag, effect or script by clicking an icon in the tool bars, or by dragging and dropping items into their positions in the page, you can see the text for the code as it is added to the source while the changes are visible simultaneously in the preview window. The Dreamweaver interface is similar in many respects, except that CC's preview window is not a separate floating window. And the toolbars don't float either. They do toggle on an off, and can be resized. You can edit the code and or tags directly and see the results of what it will look like immediately. You cover the bases from one central interface. This program is a can do application geared towards card carrying Gurus. With the companion Direct FTP, you can view images and edit pages directly on your remote host server. There are a reported eight million satisfied Gurus out there who have been creating their magic with this CoffeeCup application. The cost is $49 US. The upgrade is free for life. For darn well getting your money's worth, this is the program for you. It'll give you control of you pages, especially if you know the difference between TR and TD and can manipulate attributes of table cells. It has a list of special features as long as your arm. That list became too long, so we'll just say the it has many special features.
Amazon reviewer, "I still give this product 5 stars because it's easy, it works and it writes clean code. I beat my head against the wall using other products and I never did that with this one. It gets 5 stars for that. And it's an excellent value when compared to it's competition (Dreamweaver or Front Page). If you are new to web development don't even consider the other options." Product Description: Powerful, customizable, and extensible,
HoTMetaL PRO 6.0 gives professional developers the advanced capabilities and
productivity tools needed to quickly create sophisticated sites. With full
support for the newest Web technologies and unrivaled editing, site management,
and publishing tools, HoTMetaL PRO 6.0 is an excellent Web-development environment.
Dreamweaver costs the second most, 2-6 times the price tag of the others. With a few nit-picky caveats CNET.com and HotWired.com list it as their top wysiwyg choice. Some members have started using Dreamweaver and say that if the price comes down, it may be a standard by which html editors are judged in the future. There are a lot of competitors. If you have the need and $300 go ahead and use our associate links to click through and get it. Many have the conception of Dreamweaver as a totally perfect application. The companion Homesite handcoder can be used to validate code.
Advice from a Dreamweaver user about one of Dreamweaver's very effective "find and replace" feature:
Two hand coding editors. "The Best Compliment to DreamWeaver! After downloading HomeSite 5, I set the
program up and went to work. The first thing I did was to bring up a document and
validate the code. I fixed the errors. There is something called "CodeSweep".
This arranges the code so it is easier to follow. I can check for broken links.
HomeSite has been on my computer for a week. In that time, I've checked and updated
the code on about 50 pages. And, also, my site index is HTML 4.01 validated, with
the rest of the site to follow. What HomeSite has given me is time. I've wanted
something to help with my site management. With DreamWeaver, you can't beat it!" BBEdit is used by many Mac purists, which we are not, although if we remember correctly this might have been the second we first learned on. Used mainly for web page code writing, this application was originally intended for writing application programs in standard computer languages. One very useful point is that it will open and convert any HTML document. All versions we have used have not used color coded tags - everything is in black and white. BBEdit is a Builder.com's editor's choice. |
NON-HTML based page and presentation applications. There are two fundamentally different ways of determining the location or layout of text and images within a computer generated page. HTML is based upon a linear readout of tags and script. Applications for the creation of page layouts for printed material use a slightly more sophisticated coordinate readout of file content. This method is more flexible and more precise. Wouldn't it be nice if these kinds of applications could supplant HTML? Instead of aplphabet soup, you could just use something like Adobe Pagemaker or Microsoft Word to make a page. You could forget about table and embed tags. Just drag and drop or drag and resize or drag and reposition. Are we dreaming? |
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Adobe Acrobat. Why is this application named Acrobat? Because it juggles the text and images so well. You can layout a page with text and images and save as a .pdf file. When the page is viewed in a browser by anyone with the pliug in called Acrobat Reader, they will see the page layout precisely as you intended it. We have watched this application develop over the years since version one. It is now in widespread use as a sort of alternative to html. |
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PowerPoint is a handy tool for creating presentations. There is a plug in for viewing the presentations in a browser. Microsoft should promote the marketing of this product much more agressively. |
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