Choosing An HTML Editor

Choosing An HTML Editor...
From The Wiz's Template Design Course -- Posted With Permission.

We are just about ready to get down to the nitty-gritty of coding an actual template. There are more tags to consider but we will learn about them as we progress. What we really need to know first is what program we are going to use to create our template. There are many choices but they fall into four basic categories:

1. Simple text editors
2. More elaborate HTML editors
3. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG - pronounced wizzy-wig) editors
4. Alternate duty programs like Spreadsheets and Word Processors

Simple text editors are a good choice for the beginner. The most common of these is Microsoft's NotePad which comes with every version of Windows. You will find it in the Accessories section of your programs list. Depending on the version of Windows you are using it will look something like this:

These are the most basic of editors and they store the content in a simple text format known as ASCII (pronounced As-Key) which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Since HTML coding is just plain, ordinary, text this is a good method.

Basic text editors like this do not provide any HTML management tools, however. You must type in each and every tag and its attributes as you need them. This is actually a good way to code. It gives you complete control over your work and the resulting code, producing clean, compact, efficient results. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using NotePad, or another simple text editor, to code your templates. (Be sure to see the notes on Word Processors below!)

More elaborate HTML editors, such as 1st Page 2000 (my personal editor of choice!) and Note Tab Light, incorporate a basic text editor but offer many other features such as short-cut keystrokes to add tag pairs, visual preview modes so you can see your work as it progresses, formating and line control and much more. Both are free.

Note Tab Light is similar to 1st Page 2000 but with a smaller list of features. It is probably more suited to the beginner but is certainly powerful enough for any professional designer as well. I recommend it as a good editor for your use. Note that the view shown below is of Note Tab Pro, the commercial version, but the look is almost identical to the free version.

WYSIWYG editors are more complex than standard HTML editors providing visual screens where you can create pages by defining areas and then moving pictures and text around (called "drag and drop") to produce your web page or template. This may seem easy, and a good idea, however I do not recommend WYSIWYG editors for template design. There are several reasons for this:

1. good WYSIWYG editors are almost always commercial products and quite expensive
2. they are designed to create full web pages which are not generally suited for template use
3. often embedded coding to be used only by the editor blotes your template code
4. since they code their way you have little control over your code
5. you won't actually learn to use HTML yourself as the editor does it all for you

Some people might actually think some of these points are good things and prefer to use WYSIWYG edtitors. This course is about teaching you HTML so you should use a simple text or HTML editor for the work in this course. What you use for your own work is up to you. Here are three WYSIWYG editors:

First Page 2006 (above) is the newest release of the program I use (1st Page 2000). It has more features and competes head-on with the two commercial editors below, but at a much lower price. If you want a WYSIWYG editor, this is the one I would recommend.

Macromedia's Dreamweaver is a pricey, but very popular, WYSIWYG editor in wide-spread use among professional designers. It is a solid, quality product with all the features any designer could want. It is now owned by Adobe and ties directly into a suite of products they offer for creating multi-featured professional websites.

I must admit to a general bias against Microsoft products in general. In my opinion they tend to produce cumbersome, bloated, programs and, in the case of Front Page, the program itself seems to produce bloated, inefficient, HTML code. Though many people use, and seem to love, this program I suspect it is because they haven't seen or learned the alternatives! I cannot personally recommend this one, but use it if you are happy with it.

When choosing any editor to work with HTML be sure you understand what it can and cannot do and what features other editors offer before you get too deep into using a single program. After using any program for a while you will become comfortable with it and tend to stay with it even if there is something better that comes along. As long as the program you choose does what you need it to you will be fine. Changing from one program to another each time a new version or something better comes along is generally counter productive. You will spend most of your time learning new programs instead of creating great templates.

When I first started coding web pages back in the early 90's I used a very simple text-based editor for all my work. It served me for more than nine years. I still use it occasionally when editing a web page directly on the server. Someone recommended Note Tab Light and I tried that for a few months, and learned to like it, but I needed some more extensive features for some of my more complex websites and switched to 1st Page 2000 where I have stayed ever since (more than six years!). It does everything I need. I am using it right now (as I write this) for coding this course. Although I can clearly see that First Page 2006 is a superiour product with many great new features I just can't justify the learning time necessary to make the switch. Since 1st Page 2000 does everything I need there is no reason for me to switch at this time. If you are starting out with a new program you might want to try First Page 2006 as learning it in the first place will be no harder than learning 1st Page 2000.

There are a number of other good HTML editors availabe too. A Google search for "HTML editor" will turn up hundreds. Here are two that I've looked at which I feel are acceptable:

There are many others. You make your own choice.

Spreadsheets and Word Processors like Excel, MSWord, or even WordPad, should never be used to create templates or store text or HTML code for your templates!

These programs may be excellent for their intended purpose (manipulating tabular data or producing printed documents) but creating templates is a whole other thing. Remember I mentioned ASCII in reference to the way simple text editors store their content? Well, the Internet likes ASCII and it can have problems with other forms of character storage, although there are solutions to this problem.

If you use a word processor to create text for a web page and it has quotation marks in it, for example, the word processor will typically use left and right "curley" quotes instead of the simple (ASCII) straight quotes. These can cause problems for you with your template as, depending on the DOCTYPE statement and the META definitions in the HEAD section of the page you insert your template into, the curley quotation marks (and other characters) may not properly display and may cause other problems with your template content and layout.

I cannot stress this enough: DO NOT USE WORD PROCESSORS FOR TEMPLATE WORK!