HTML/Web Editor

[buzzkill]

I'm looking for a light-weight, easy to use, html editor. Something WYSIWYG would be helpful since I don't know much HTML and would rather learn through use than by reading a book. The pages I'll be working on are very basic (at least for right now) so it need not have a lot of bell and whistles. Something FREE would be great to start with. I've been browsing around the web, and haven't found anything that really stands out. Recommendations (please)?

I've used Front Page back in the day, which would be more than sufficient if I still had it, but I don't. Maybe something with similar functionality?

[Magnate]

I'm looking for a light-weight, easy to use, html editor. Something WYSIWYG would be helpful since I don't know much HTML and would rather learn through use than by reading a book. The pages I'll be working on are very basic (at least for right now) so it need not have a lot of bell and whistles. Something FREE would be great to start with. I've been browsing around the web, and haven't found anything that really stands out. Recommendations (please)?

I've used Front Page back in the day, which would be more than sufficient if I still had it, but I don't. Maybe something with similar functionality?

I agonised over this for a long time too - and then I discovered that OpenOffice includes functionality that's very similar to FrontPage. It doesn't qualify as lightweight in terms of disk space (but that's rarely at a premium nowadays), but it's hard to beat for ease of use - just open your html doc and edit it as if it were a Word doc. I use it for all my web pages (which are pretty basic).

[Nick]

I use Seamonkey.

[Derakon]

I generally feel that if your goal is to learn HTML, then you should be editing raw HTML, in which case any text editor will do the trick. If your goal is to make webpages, though, then the WYSIWYG stuff is fine.

[the Invisible Stalker]

HTML is designed to be trivial. Despite years of extension it still is. CSS, which you probably also need to learn, is only slightly less trivial. Every program I've ever seen which claims to make creating web pages easier in fact make it harder. What I use is:

vi Feel free to substitute emacs or notepad or whatever non-wysiwyg editor if you prefer. It doesn't matter. For a few pages which don't change often you need nothing else.

For any more complicated I also use:

m4 As I said, HTML is designed to be trivial. That can make it annoying. It has no control structures like loops. This can make simple tasks very repetitive. In principle specialist tools could help with that, but in reality they don't. Instead general tools for automating annoying tasks perform better. If you don't like m4, and most people don't, then awk is also a good choice for this role. I also use sed occasionally.

make Once you start generating pages automatically from other files you will need to make sure the pages are kept up to date when those files are changed. You could do this by hand, but it's exactly the sort of thing make was designed for.

rcs Version control is irreplaceable for figuring what went wrong when and why. I use rcs for almost everything I do, and should really use it for the rest. The best thing about it is the freedom to delete large parts of files, confident in the knowledge that you can undo the changes later if (when?) things don't work.

[buzzkill]

I generally feel that if your goal is to learn HTML, then you should be editing raw HTML, in which case any text editor will do the trick. If your goal is to make webpages, though, then the WYSIWYG stuff is fine.

I hear ya, but I'm not really interested in learning, though I'm not opposed to it. Just want to do what's easiest. Right now that seems to be WYSIWYG.

I nabbed SeaMonkey, gonna give it a look.

@ Invis Stalker, way to much info .

[Nick]

Seamonkey is a full web suite, so includes browser, emailer, etc - the bit you want to use is Composer. It easily allows you to switch views between WYSIWIG and raw anyway, so if you do ever want to learn HTML it's a good way to start.

[Fendell Orcbane]

This post is funny because I spent two hours yesterday trying to create a webpage with a text editor and for the life of me I couldn't fighure out how to make it work. I followed A Complete Idiots Guide to Creating a Webpage and I still couldn't make it work.

Now to try Seamonkey. Thanks Nick!

[buzzkill]

Seamonkey is a full web suite, so includes browser, emailer, etc - the bit you want to use is Composer. It easily allows you to switch views between WYSIWIG and raw anyway, so if you do ever want to learn HTML it's a good way to start.

NICK!!! I can't get SeaMonkey to remember my publishing info (ftp server, user name, password). It seems that it should. What am I doing wrong? (It's the same info every time, I'm only working on one site).

[Nick]

NICK!!! I can't get SeaMonkey to remember my publishing info (ftp server, user name, password). It seems that it should. What am I doing wrong? (It's the same info every time, I'm only working on one site).

Seems to work OK for me (on OSX) - there's a publishing settings thing on the Edit menu. Not that I actually use it - I tend to either ftp from the command line, or use FireFTP in Firefox.

[buzzkill]

OK. I've come to terms with most of SeaMonkey's quirks (although how it decides to insert line breaks in the source code is bizarre).

I have a new problem. The page I'm working on (mcdgc.org) was created (by someone else) using frames and CSS. After making many changes I thought I was rid of all remnants of frames, but apparently the page is (all of the pages are) still being displayed in a frame, indicated by the fact that the address in the address bar never changes (the back button always returns to the home page), and that occasionally upon right click I'll get to option to 'view frame source' or 'view page source'.

I've searched the web extensively and failed to find a solution to this problem, or at least a solution that I can comprehend. I guessing the frame is somehow tied to the CSS, but I can't figure it out. Any help would be just great?

[Derakon]

Taking a look at the source to the front page, it's just a frame containing the content from http://mcdgc.cvillebicycling.com/ . That page works correctly -- clicking on links loads new pages with proper URLs and so on. If you can just replace the frame with the actual content you should be good to go. Heck, you could replace the front page with a redirect to that URL and it'd probably work fine.

[buzzkill]

Taking a look at the source to the front page, it's just a frame containing the content from http://mcdgc.cvillebicycling.com/ . That page works correctly -- clicking on links loads new pages with proper URLs and so on. If you can just replace the frame with the actual content you should be good to go. Heck, you could replace the front page with a redirect to that URL and it'd probably work fine.

How? I can't find the code that creates the frame. I've removed every obvious reference to frames in every page. Where is the frame coming from?

[Derakon]

Search the entire codebase for "frameset". Somewhere you have a page that's making a frame. Maybe it's generated by some PHP (or whatever your backend scripting language is). But it's not the CSS; CSS modifies HTML but doesn't generate it.

[buzzkill]

Search the entire codebase for "frameset". Somewhere you have a page that's making a frame. Maybe it's generated by some PHP (or whatever your backend scripting language is). But it's not the CSS; CSS modifies HTML but doesn't generate it.

Thanks for trying Derakon. I've no doubt your advice is correct but I don't have the skill set to follow up on it (I did try). It wasn't a complete loss though. By googling "remove frameset" I found a little javascript that I stuffed into index.htm, and that did the trick.