Looking for an application to help me write HTML

[Leonard Blaisdell]

Tidy works pretty good on broadband, but there are some scripts that the
prog uses to run and sometimes the script clogs up FF and its hard to
run Tidy on the page.

Plus the extension really dislikes pages with tons
of errors on them, like say over 1,000 errors, esp 20,000 errors or so.
Those pages almost choke the extension.

Fixing the first error may fix a bunch of them.

Plus, sometimes when Tidy "cleans
up" the HTML, the "cleaned version" of the page is somewhat broken,
visually-wise, so then I just leave the "errors" in.

Fix the first error first. Fix the second error next. Errors will tend
to dissolve later.

All in all, it's one of the coolest FF extensions out there.

Tidy is a multi-platform program that makes the web better. It is not
browser specific.

leo

 

[Andy Dingley]

Homesite does this too.

Homesite is similar, but has its drawbacks. You have to pay for it and
it's also an excresence of the Macromedia empire. This brings in many
of Dreamweaver's faults (the idea that everything needs to be done by
boilerplate script fragments) and it's also not clear what their
commercial long-term view of Homesite is. It doesn't look exactly like
a strategic product for them, and there's some indication that it's
really just trying to grab customer for eventually upgrading to DW.

I also don't like DW's approach to "validation" and don't know if
Homesite suffers from the same. A recent editor that advises _against_
using the title attribute because NS4 doesn't support it is just plain
broken.

Why would any web designer prefer to use a Notepad-type application and type out all
their tags by hand instead of using writing HTML with one of these tag
selector programs that lets you grab the tags off a menu?

It's quicker.

It's not restricted by some editor author's idea of mis-reading an
obsolete version of the spec.

 

[Bob]

<http://tidy.sourceforge.net/> will probably run on your machine. Then
you don't have to worry about connection speed.

Thx man. I hope it works.

Fixing the first error may fix a bunch of them.

They were generated by the insane Blogger WYSIWYG editor, which I pretty
much don't use much anymore. I use the Blogger HTML editor, which is
basically just Notepad on the Blogger site. That WYSIWYG editor is so
broken it is not even funny. Sometimes it just goes berserk and puts in
like 1000's of <font> tags and closes them inexplicably with </span>.
Plus it will take every word in a paragraph and make some weird broken
<a> tag, like <a href = They> <a href = were> <a href = generated> using
this paragraph. It's just wacko. Plus if you fix & errors to &amp; and
then reload the WYSIWYG, it helpfully "unfixes" them back to &! Thanks!

Fix the first error first. Fix the second error next. Errors will tend
to dissolve later.

At the moment, I have some code (mostly from advertisers) that I can't
seem to "fix" without breaking the ad code visually. So I left the
"errors" in. You are welcome to give it a whirl if you wish. Let me know
and I will post with the problematic code.

 

[roomsixproductions]

I use EditPlus 2.21, Bob. What I like most about this program is that
it has a built-in FTP program, so I can edit files on my PC and FTP
them to my server OR edit files on my server from my PC.

EditPlus Homepage:
http://www.editplus.com/

EditPlus Wiki
http://www.editplus.info/wiki/Main_Page

 

[Bob]

I use EditPlus 2.21, Bob. What I like most about this program is that
it has a built-in FTP program, so I can edit files on my PC and FTP
them to my server OR edit files on my server from my PC.

That's a really cool feature in text editor.

I'm using Notepad++ now. Why anyone would stick with ordinary Notepad is
beyond me. Notepad++ is really neat.

EditPlus Homepage:
http://www.editplus.com/

EditPlus Wiki
http://www.editplus.info/wiki/Main_Page

I will check it out.

 

[dorayme]

Homesite ....has a
"tag selector" which is something else I am looking for. Why would any
web designer prefer to use a Notepad-type application and type out all
their tags by hand instead of using writing HTML with one of these tag
selector programs that lets you grab the tags off a menu? It would seem
to be so much faster to use the application and just grab the tags.

Grabbing tags from menus becomes quite inconvenient. It is slow
and fiddly and you would need to do it so often if that is how
you do it. It is very clumsy indeed. (It is good for when you
forget things and need a reminder of what is there, and while
there you grab it or otherwise order it to appear).

Better is keyboard shortcuts. There are all sorts of ways of
doing this. On OS 9 on a Mac, I used a macro prgm to make a set
of keyboard shortcuts. For example, control p and <p> appears,
control option p and </p> appears. All in this pattern, control
for the opening, control option for the closing. How convenient
this was I am now realising acutely in OS X as I have not got
around to making an equivalent, having to actually type and cut
and paste and it is not good.

Many auto tag makers insist on putting both opening and closing
together and you fill in between or else you have what you want
enclosed selected and you order tag wrap. What a fiddle, what
foresight, what toing and froing... If you want to do things in
the order of typing, you open a tag, type out the content or
further instruction for content, close it, nothing beats key
commands (am not saying this replaces the time saving grabbing of
whole structures from other html docs and modifying the contents
etc).

 

[jussij]

What I am interested in is not a WYSIWYG application

The Zeus for Windows is a non-WYSIWYG HTML editor:

http://www.zeusedit.com/features.html

It does HTML syntax highlighting, code folding, seamless ftp/sftp
editing, project workspace management etc.

Sometimes I have mistakes in my HTML like a tag opened and not
closed or a tag closed with no opening tag, or a tag that is
written slightly incorrectly (one character missing or in the
wrong place). I would like to be able to run my HTML through
the application and have the program fix tag typos for me.

Zeus can check your HTML for W3C conformance by making
use of the Tidy HTML utility:

http://www.zeusedit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=194

Zeus uses the Tidy output to jump to the line of error.

Jussi Jumppanen
Author: Zeus for Windows
Note: Zeus is shareware (45 day trial).