[TriLUG] web authoring packages

Kevin Hunter hunteke at earlham.edu
Mon Aug 4 14:26:56 EDT 2008


At 10:36a -0700 on Mon, 04 Aug 2008, Brian McCullough wrote:
>> Hmm, I use Firefox and Firebug a lot.  I cannot claim the same reaction.
>>  It works as I expect it, and is damned helpful.  If you suspect it's
>> buggy, I suggest that you make sure you have the latest versions of
>> each.  I also suggest you spend more time with them on certain projects.
> 
> I am _guessing_ that the OP is thinking of these as "authoring" tools,
> where I see them as, certainly in the case of Firebug, and to some
> extent for the Firefox Web Developer Tools, debugging and analysis tools
> for your existing code.  They help by showing the structure, content,
> and settings of the code that you have written in your text editor, but
> don't necessarily "hold your hand" while you are writing that code.

Thank you for pointing that out.  I had that in mind to say, then "ooh
something shiny" caught my eye, and I forgot.  :-)

Very true.  Firebug is *not* a tool to write new code, HTML, DOM, etc.
It's a tool to help debug what you've already written.

If you're looking for a complete WYSIWYG solution for websites, I would
point you towards a CMS system of some sort (Drupal, Joomla, etc.).  But
that will take some setup *somewhere*.

Failing that, use what's available (Dreamweaver, Nvu such as it is,
KompoZer, etc.) and be content that it works at all.

Failing that, I might suggest a hybrid work model, where you design it
basically in Dreamweaver et al., then do the behind-the-scenes touch up
with a good ol' text editor and a W3 compliant validator[1].
Preferably, your text editor is XML aware and has syntax highlighting,
etc. etc.  (Eclipse, and jEdit, with plugins both do for sure.  I
believe gEdit can as well, but I haven't messed with it.)

To be less snobbish/elitist than I fear I'm sounding, I'll point out
that I originally used an online tutorial to learn the basics of coding
a webpage in Notepad, oh say in HTML 3.2 days.  Then I found and used a
WYSIWYG editor for a couple of sites.  Netscape Composer, I think, from
the Communicator series.  (I turned my father on to it, and he uses it
to this day on his Windows box to maintain a local soccer website.  It's
definitely functional.)  About 4 years ago, I migrated to writing all my
code entirely in a text editor.  It's definitely a learning process, and
one that is not helped by tools that are still fledgling.

Good luck,

Kevin "Hey, I don't have A.D...  Ooh, shiny!" Hunter

[1] http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/



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