I have been surfing the Net since last week sampling tools which could help me create Web pages. There are quite a lot of them: some are open source, others are not but are still free, some are shareware, yet others are trial versions of their commercial siblings. These tools can be broadly categorized as either text editors, HTML editors, or WYSIWYG Page Designers.
Text Editors
Web pages happen to be plain text which just includes some markup along with the content in order for a browser to know how to display or present that content. This means that even a simple text editor can create and edit web pages.
This lowers the barrier of entry considerably—you do not need any special IDE or compiler like you would when programming. To make Web pages, you only need a text editor and a browser—both are already on your system. You can also download better alternatives at no cost other than your internet connection.
If you are still learning, this is the best way to start. You do not have to make any investment in cost and time (in learning a more powerful and hence, complicated software). Also, you get to focus on how to cut the grass rather than how to operate your XD2000+ lawnmower.
A few sample of text editors are:
HTML Editors
These are more specialized text editors. They are still technically text editors but have functions that make creating Web pages faster and easier. Some of these HTML editors are souped up text editors while others are designed to be HTML editors from the start.
These tools are better suited to those who already know their code and need something to up their productivity. They already know the doctype declaration like the back of their hand and could type in the xmlns attribute and other meta elements even while asleep. So, they’d rather let the software automate those mundane task. These tools are like calculators which should not be used while still learning your arithmetic but should be resorted to later when you need to focus on the finer points of differential equations.
Here are some advanced text editors which can double-duty as HTML editors:
And here are some of the more dedicated ones:
WYSIWYG Page Designers
You will have better luck searching the Web if you search for WYSIWYG HTML Editors rather than WYSIWYG Page Designers. But I believe that the latter is the more accurate term.
WYSIWYG Page Designers let you compose using colors, layouts, fonts, and graphics. It then generates the CSS and HTML or XHTML code for you. This makes complex designs and layouts a little easier.
However, there is a downside to this. Since the software generates the code instead of you, and since we already know that computers are crappy most of the time when it comes to making complex decisions, some generated code leaves much to be desired. This is more so when the complex decision is creative in nature.
This resulted in a division among the Web design and development community. The designer/ artistic types mostly prefer WYSIWYG Page Designers while the development/ programmer types mostly prefer HTML editors. The battle cry of the former is productivity and efficiency while that of the latter is elegance and correctness.
In my side of the fence, I do not think that you should be one or the other. Why not have the best of both worlds? You can always start designing things visually with a WYSIWYG Page Designer and then tidy things up with an HTML editor. Or, if your page can be neatly divided into more visual and less visual parts, you can design the former with a WYSIWYG Page Designer and the latter with an HTML editor.
The big players in this category are Adobe and Microsoft with their Dreamweaver and Expression Web applications. But there are also simpler and cheaper ones:
A Word About WYSIWYG HTML Editors
A WYSIWYG HTML Editor is somewhat of a misnomer. It can even be considered an oxymoron or a contradiction of terminology. Technically, there is no WYSIWYG HTML editor. What an HTML editor does is edit HTML code in the same manner that a text editor edits text. The HTML code you write in an HTML Editor is composed of text and markup (and that’s what you see); what you get in the browser are images and nicely formatted text with different colors and a layout so different from that of the source document. What you see, therefore, will not be what you will get.
So, if there are no WYSIWYG HTML editors or HTML editors that are WYSIWYG, what do we call those software being referred to as such? First, let us see what they do. They let you design the look and layout of the page visually, add some graphics and then generate the HTML or XHTML code and the stylesheet. Based on that, it would be more fitting to call them WYSIWYG Page Designers because (hopefully) the design and layout you made will be the same as that displayed in the viewer’s browser.
Creating Web pages has become more involved nowadays compared to how it has been in the past. Fortunately, the tools we use to develop them have also improved and have become more available. We only need to choose the right one in these embarrassment of riches.
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This is awesome. Smart!
ReplyDelete@Diane: I'm Glad to hear that. :)
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