Miscella/Web NotesI have been trying to learn how to work with Cascading Stylesheets so that my web pages can be more adherent to the standards of the W3C. W3C specifications are supposed to ensure that more browsers would be able to "read" one's web pages. But guess what? One recent webmaster tip states that it would be better to avoid using CSS (acronym for Cascading Stylesheets) so that older browsers can read one's web pages. But CSS is HTML 4.0 stuff! Does this mean that HTML 4.0 specifications do not necessarily ensure that more browsers read one's webpages? Man, things can get really confusing once one gets deep into HTML-ing!
HTML Editors in Review is a website dedicated to Non-commercial HTML Source Code Editors. As of this writing, it features Arachnophilia, HTML Beauty, xSite (and xEdit) and HTML Kit. The presentation for each Editor is quite simple: A one-page description, screenshots and features (this last taken from the software's readme file, or website). The site complements the contents of Ayel Lee's HTML Tutorials and that of Luke16verse9.com. Good commercial HTML editors are not cheap, that's for sure. But sometimes source code editors of this kind have features that one cannot find in the non-commercial ones. Among the commercial editors, I prefer to use CoffeeCup and Homesite. But I haven't yet seen a source code editor that rivals the splash screens of HTML Beauty.
So, how come this page doesn't look the others?, asks WesfordNick in an email sent to me the other day. We have been talking about templates and themed web sites the other day and when he saw the source code of this page (by right-clicking on his browser window) he noticed that I did not use the embedded style sheet I have been using for the other pages. My response is simply this: I intend that this page would look like something that has been typed via a typewriter. I want this page to be printable.
Frontpage Express 2.0 (a trademark of Microsoft) is the object of a tutorial in one of the sites I visited today. The tutorial was informative in that it made me think about WYSIWYGs in a new way.
I have a copy of Frontpage Express 3.0 in my computer, so after reading the tutorial, I did some WYSIWYG-ing. And guess what I found out? There are some things I can do with a WYSIWYG like Frontpage Express 3.0 that I cannot do with a Source Code Editor: draw a complicated table in just 5 minutes. Consider this example. Got your attention? Now click here for a fuller view of the page. If you would notice, all those borders are actually rows or columns that were each given a different color, height and width value. Imagine yourself doing that with a non-WYSIWYG editor like HTML Beauty or even Notepad, man, it can take you hours!
Pooza asks: "If WYSIWYGs are much easier to use, so why still use text editors?" I respond: WYSIWYGs code web pages for the user. Most often, it will use codes that only its favored web browser would be able to interpret rightly. And it does this without the user knowing it. Source code editors, though more difficult to use, offer something that WYSIWYGs can't: freedom. With source code editors, one can -- with some knowledge of HTML -- format a web page according to his/her heart's content. To read more about this, go to our Web Tips page.
