Web Publishing for Starving Students and Other Financially-Challenged People

HTML Editors

HTML Editors are programs that help you add HTML code. They relieve you of having to type in every single bit of the HTML code yourself, or having to memorize every tag. They often include extra tools that help you clean up HTML code, help you manage your site, add javascripts, etc. With some editors, you are looking at the actual code itself while you are editing. With others, you are looking at the page as it would appear in the browser while the program writes the code behind the scenes. This latter group is known as WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get). One problem with the WYSIWYG editors is that many don't write very clean HTML code. Some are much better than others. Dreamweaver and FrontPage are two of the better known WYSIWYG editors.

A great place to find a free WYSIWYG Web authoring tool is right on your hard drive. You downloaded it along with your browser if you happen to be using Navigator Communicator 4 or Internet Explorer 4. Although these editors don't have as many features as their more expensive WYSIWYG cousins, they definitely can get you started fast, and you can add the finishing touches with your text or HTML editor.

There are many full-featured free or inexpensive HTML editors available at the shareware sites listed on our home page. Below are a few of our favorite editors.

  • A great HTML Shareware editor for Mac is PageSpinner. Try it. If you like it, you can register it for $29.95.

  • A free editor for the Mac is BBEdit Lite. The full version has long been a favorite with Mac HTML professionals. It's available at: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit_lite/lite-download.html.
     

  • A free Careware HTML editor for Windows with lots of features is Arachnophilia. Perhaps an easier place to download it from is one of the shareware sites like TUCOWS or ZDNet. You can do a search for this file once you get there, but the exact address of it at ZDNet is: http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,,000C7J,.html

  • A free HTML editor for Windows is Evrsoft's 1st Page 2000 . It's top rated at http://www.zdnet.com/downloads (a great place to download software). The exact address for this file at ZDNet is: http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,,0013DH,.html

  • Vicki Jean Beauchamp wrote to tell us that she really likes an absolutely free editor for Windows called HTML Notes.

  • Another HTML editor for Windows that has very high ratings is NoteTab, a shareware award winning text and html editor. It features integrated support for HTML TIDY, a program that checks your HTML code and can clean up a host of errors or proproietary code.
When you have finished your pages, you should view them in several HTML browsers to make sure they look the way you want them to, because each browser interprets HTML in its own unique way. You can also use a tool such as HTML TIDY to check the code that you have written and to correct errors. You can also use TIDY to remove extra, unneeded code placed in a document when they are converted from Word documents to HTML. This will make your page download and render more quickly and correctly.

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