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HTML editting is not as difficult as you may
think. Producing straight-forward documents is trivially simple,
even through a normal text editor. Actually, unless you happen to
be using one of the better editors, it is probably easier for the
novice to produce simple HTML via a text editor because most of the
content will be text anyway.
 Starting difficulties
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The major difficulty that I encountered at the beginning was finding out
what HTML tags were and the order in which
they had to go in. This is where the better editors can help the novice
creator, as they take care of things like the <HEAD> and
<BODY> tags, and place paragraph breaks (<P>)
in appropriate places automatically, mostly removing the problem.
However to find out what the editor actually placed in the HTML
file you will have to look at it either with a text editor, or
using your browser's view document source option.
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HINT: view the source
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Viewing the source HTML for a page that you have downloaded is also an
excellent way of finding out how to format data for your pages. By doing
this you should also be able to see the file exactly as the browser
received it without any changes to the formatting of the contents (apart
from any font or color renditions). It is then obvious how the formatting
of the HTML affects its readability and, eventually, its maintenance.
Tools to produce HTML pages
In the past I have tried several ways of producing HTML documents via editors.
Of course there are far more than I have tried and I may not have chosen the
best or easiest to use, but all-in-all I was disappointed. When looking at the
source for Web pages it is often obvious whether the HTML has been hand-crafted
or is the result of using an editing tool of some kind.
Probably the worst that I have seen is from saving a document produced in Word.
It throws in all kinds of things to try to make the page look exactly the way it
did when you were editing it originally, or in the case of more complex documents,
completely fails to make the HTML page look anything like its Word equivalent.
In my experience the actual HTML is difficult to read, is overly large, and very
difficult to edit with any other tool without first cleaning it up.
The new editor with Netscape 7 looks really nice, but I have yet to put it
to any real use. When I do, I'll report here.
Conclusions
I'm not really stuck on any of the editors I have tried. So for now at least
I will stick with my trusty text editor, previewing the HTML in my choice of
browsers.
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HINT: keep it neat and tidy
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If you do decide to use a text editor to create your HTML files you
may find it useful to approach the task as though you were, in effect,
writing a program that describes what your page will look like.
I say this approach is useful because, when writing a program, it is
sensible to pay attention to the formatting of your code as this
helps remove simple syntax problems straight away. Therefore, by keeping
the formatting style of the source HTML file neat and tidy, nice
identations and less than 80 character lines and so on, your mistakes,
should you make any, will be easier to spot.
Below is a list of sites that I have found useful.
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