Intel and Digital settle. Out of court, after Digital sued Intel for
stealing Digital's Alpha technology to develop the Pentium. Intel countersued
a month ago, but on October 22nd caved, giving Digital 1.6 billion dollars and purchasing
two of DEC's unprofitable chipfab facilities, Gee, I wonder who was the guilty one...
IT'S THE WAY TO LEAVE YOUR MARK in the '90s, and it is revolutionizing cast media as we know it. So you want to make a webpage. Webpages can be fun to make, and a quick way of expressing your views and ideas in the public eye.
Writing a page does require some work, and knowledge in computers. Some
people like to use webpage editors to slim down the learning curve.
These editors allow the user to create pages quickly, using plain English
commands - at least in theory.
Being a HTML purist, I would eschew using a web page editor at all. In the beginning, I've meddled with quite a few of them, and I discovered Notepad and MS-DOS Editor has served me quite well. Remember, like all Internet transmissions, HTML pages are formatted in non-compiled, plain text. Microsoft FrontPage has apparently brings a "gee-whiz" response from several people, but I find it silly to buy a $209 product to produce roughly the same thing as a text editor. Typing in the code directly gives you much more control on the final product, and using a HTML editor often seems like painting with a puck. HTML is pretty easy to pick up anyway.
You still have to learn HTML, especially the tagging syntax. No editor I've seen will totally hide code away. Finally, you may find yourself having to make little cosmetic changes or adding a new tag to your page that your editor doesn't support.
Another danger is the fact your web editor may not support certain tags, or may generate pages incompatible with a certain browser. For example, an editor may format a page with a variety of tags, some supported by Netscape, some by HTML 3.2, some neither. In addition, you can bet Microsoft FrontPage caters to Internet Explorer(urk!)-specific tags.
What web editors lack in accuracy, they make it up in speed. If you need to convert pages of text into simple webpages, a web editor is perfect. However, pages generated like this often end up having the assembly line look. Editors are also great for dealing with the menial tasks, like finding the hexdecimal value of a particular colour.
The three products above are also available as non-"Pro" shareware/freeware versions.
Finally, nothing can replace experience, and a good eye. Web editors cannot tell whether colours clash, or paragraphs are misaligned. Always proofread the final code. Editors are nice for quick and dirty markup jobs, but usually sophisticated layouts require a familiar knowledge in HTML, design planning and, most of all, human ingenuity. And that is one thing software can never replace. [imo]
(C)opyright Gregory Lam, All rights reserved. You are allowed to copy this document sans charge on the condition none of it is altered or used without proper bibliographical references.
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