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Subject:Re: YOUR FAVORIATE HTML EDITOR From:Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM Date:Wed, 3 Apr 1996 06:33:00 -0600
For a while there was the debate over HTML versus Adobe Acrobat. For
those of us who heartily agree that HTML is the open road to online
documents, what editor do you use or would recommend?
Even though I don't believe *the* open road exists (it looks more to me
like there are many) I'll toss my preference into the ring.
I use a simple text editor which has HTML macros. I've not seen a wysiwyg
HTML editor worth using, because HTML is changing so fast that none of them
support all the features of it. Using a text editor with macros means that
I can quickly add a new macro to cover a new feature that's quite useful,
without having to wait for the publisher to get around to updating their
software. And it means that all HTML tags operate the same way, rather than
some being wysiwyg and some not.
Since HTML pages look different in different browsers anyway, wysiwyg
editors are almost irrelevant, as you will still have to test your page
with different browsers to make sure it displays adequately in all the
browsers your page is likely to see. (This is not likely to change soon, as
it seems NetScape didn't even bother to send a representative to the last
World Wide Web Consortium meeting. Don't read too much into the fact that
MS *is* attending the standards meetings. They attended the ANSI committe
meetings on a BASIC standard as well, but when it turned out the committee
wasn't going to simply rubber-stamp the MS sepcification they decided to
ignore the ANSI standard.)
When I've got a doc in Word that I want to translate to HTML, I start with
Internet Assistant, but it's not capable of producing a usable page on it's
own, except for the most simple documents. So I then make a "clean-up" pass
with my editor to get everything set up.
Of all the editors, SiteMill seems to me to be the best, but it's still got
many deficiencies.
Have fun,
Arlen
arlen -dot- p -dot- walker -at- jci -dot- com
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