HTML Editors
Click here for info on PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDE).
When creating websites, you'll inevitably need to create new pages and edit old ones. There are a plethora of HTML editors out there, ranging from basic text editors like Notepad, to WYSIWYG editors - (What You See Is What You Get) where you see only the rendered page - like Microsoft FrontPage. You can pay $100s, or nothing at all...
I, like many webmasters, prefer to use an editor that allows me to work on the raw HTML - that's because HTML is really easy, and I like to have control of my code. Most WYSIWYG editors write horrible messy, wasteful code! For example, if I open a 10K (size) web page created with Arachnophilia in StarOffice, then save it without making any changes at all, it becomes 14K! Microsoft Word actually doubles the size of this page.
On the other end of the scale, simple text editors like Notepad (which comes with Windows) are too basic for serious use.
- Arachnophilia is an excellent, and completely free HTML editor. Like most good editors, it allows you to write the code in one window, and preview the rendered web page in another. Unlike others, Arachnophilia is fast and efficient, and also contains lots of extremely useful features like: Analysing your website and code, Changing multiple files at once, Uploading your files...
Unfortunately, since version 5 - it's been changed to run under Java. The author has done this to make it platform independent - i.e. this version of Arachnophilia can run on a PC, a Mac, a Unix machine... anything for which there is a java interpreter.
Unfortunately, This makes it a lot slower than it was, and it doesn't have all the cool features. So I'd have to recommend you use the old version 4.0. which is actually much better
- 1st Page 2000 From Evrsoft is quite different in that - where Arachnophilia is small and light - 1st Page is huge and packed with loads of impressive features (including a complete HTML 4 Reference manual!) It's an excellent editor! It's quite quick (once loaded) and seems to be every bit as good as anything else out there. Free.
- HTML-Kit is a very popular, full featured freeware HTML/programmers editor which supports plug-ins, has an FTP browser, code validation and lots more.
- Selida A free HTML editor with a choice of text or WYSIWYG mode. Selida is a nice editor. It writes good simple code in it's 'design' mode and has some great template pages which you could use as a basis for your own webpages later on. Check it out!
Arachnophilia TIPS:
To open multiple files at once, then go to 'File' menu, then 'Open File', then 'HTML File', then when the dialog box appears, you hold down the 'Shift' or 'Control' keys while you click on the files you want. The highlighted files will be loaded when you click on 'Open'
You can drag files from Explorer and drop them into Arachnophilia - and it opens the file for editing.
As we're going to be using PHP, we need to add the ability to handle the PHP file extensions (file 'types') to Arachnophilia. It's easy, just open this file:
.../Arachnophilia/toolbars/filesuffixes.txt
then add the following text to the beginning of the 'HTML Files' line: php,php3,phtml. The line should then look like this:
php,php3,phtml,html,htm,shtml,asp,stm,idc,htx,ssi,cfm,hts,css ; HTML files
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If you really want to avoid HTML coding, you can use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor. There aren't many free ones, but aolpress is pretty much the simplest and best, although AOL don't support it any more (shame!). Microsoft used to distribute FrontPage Express free with Internet Explorer though, again, it's no longer officially supported. It is a capable basic editor and it's still available to download in some places.
Macromedia's Dreamweaver writes fairly good code. It supposed to just add what's required, not a whole raft of extra stuff, and it promises not to change the code you write! Dreamweaver MX now integrates with Fireworks and Flash to enable rapid web site development. Dreamweaver is expensive however, and like all complex software packages - it takes time to learn.
If you do use Dreamweaver, there are lots of great books and tutorials available to help you get over the initial learning curve. Dreamweaver MX Magic by Al Sparber, Gerry Jackson gets a very good rating in Amazon.
There are always word processing programs like MS Word, or StarOffice. Both are extremely easy to use, but they really don't write very good code.
If you use a WYSIWYG editor you'll still need to add source code if you plan to have any PHP code in there (e.g. for a hit counter). You can add source code tags directly into some WYSIWYG editors, but if you can't you'll still need to edit the HTML using a text editor like Arachnophilia.
Other stuff you might like to check out:
- Web Dwarf from Virtual Mechanics is a freeware WYSIWYG editor with 'pixel precision placing'.
- AceHTML is a freeware version of a commercial ($50) editor. Has HTML syntax checking...
- Web-O-Rama A 'donationware' HTML editor with a commercial version available.
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