Web Page Editors

Knowing about the types of web page editors that are available to you and choosing one to use is one of the first decisions you'll make as you begin to create your own website. Web page editing tools generally fall into three categories: text-based editors, split window editors, and WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editors. This tutorial will explain the difference between the types of web page editing tools.

Note that web page editors are often called HTML editors. All web page editors can create great XHTML code.

Text-Based Web Page Editors

For XHTML purists and those who know the rules for XHTML editing, text-based editors are the tool of choice. These are only slightly different than raw text editors like BB-Edit or Notepad. The difference between a text editor like Notepad and an text-based XHTML editor is convenience. Text-based editors usually include tools that let you quickly insert common XHTML code snippets or element combinations. They also have one-button clicks to open your XHTML page in a browser to check it where regular text editors don't. This save lots of time in saving an XHTML file and then opening it in a browser window to check the results of your work.

Essentially, text-based XHTML editors are regular text editors with some extra Web-editing features added to them.

Split Window Web Page Editors

Split Window web page editors are basically text-based editors with an attached preview screen that displays the results of your work as you are editing your code. You get a live preview of your page as you're creating it. This saves a lot of time in saving your file and then opening it in a browser to view it. Other than that, they are very similar to the text-based editors above.

WYSIWYG Web Page Editors

WYSIWYG web page editors are some of the more sophisticated web editing tools and work very much like a word processor. What you type in the editor is what you get on our web page. You type in text and format it just like you might do in Microsoft Word. Inserting images is about the same.

In WYSIWYG editors, XHTML markup is generated automatically behind the scenes as you're typing in the word processor-like interface. That means you don't need to write your own XHTML tags. The editor does it for you.

Choosing the Right Web Page Editor

Any web page editing tool will produce excellent web pages and a tool like one of those listed above will be much easier to use than a simple text editing tool. The type of tool you choose will depend on how many features you want and how much money you want to spend. Although there are some very good tools that won't cost you anything.

Some of the most sophisticated and powerful web page editing tools combine many of the features of text-based editors, split window editors, and WYSIWYG web page editors. Adobe's Dreamweaver is an example of this type of very powerful web editing tool.

No matter what tool you choose, you'll still need to understand some basics about XHTML to get the results you want. The WYSIWYG tool will be much easier and faster to use, but even with that, you'll want to fine tune the code that it produces and in order to do that, you'll need to understand XHTML.

I've been creating web pages for a dozen or more years and I've used everything from Notepad, Coffee-Cup, FrontPage, Hot Dog Pro, Claris Works, BB-Edit, DreamWeaver and more. Even MS Word promotes itself as a tool that generates web pages, but it's been my experience that you're much better off getting a tool that is a dedicated web page editor, not one that doubles as a word processor or desk top publishing program that also makes web page. These tools usually add tons of extraneous code in order to make them work. That boats the code on your web page making it a larger file than it needs to be and also slower to download.

If you're serious about creating quality web page, I recommend that you invest in a professional tool. If you don't know a lot about XHTML tags and code, then get a WYSIWYG editor that writes the code for you. As you learn more about XHTML you can shift to more hand coding if you prefer, but I'm guessing that once you get used to using a WYSIWYG editor, you won't go back to a text-based editor.

The best tool that I've used and the web page editor that I recommend is Adobe's (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver. This is a powerful professional WYSIWYG editor. It's also good if you're going to be building dynamic database driven web pages where your web page interacts with a database through a programming language known as middle ware. You'll hear more about that on another page.

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