What html generator are you using ?

[ugarfie]

I am looking into a new web page generator, and was wondering what everyone out htere in Futurequest land was using ?

Deb what do you use ?

I have been using a combo of "Coffee Cup" and "NS Composer" neither of which I am happy with. Well maybe I just do not have enough patience.

I am looking to redesign my entire site to use frames, and MySQL etc...

- Ursula :)

[Justin]

If you are planning to use PHP/Perl/MySQL etc, you will probably want to learn HTML and use a text editor... I use ScratchPad, my own lil text editor. Deb I think uses Ultra Edit for her HTML...

You cannot edit things like this UBB or any real dynamic pages with an HTML editor... however you can use them to learn how to write HTML :)[nbsp][nbsp]But it's best to learn how to write HTML, then you can more easily make pages with PHP that interface with MySQL and so on...

Hope this helps.

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Mandi]

Home Site by Allaire:[nbsp][nbsp]www.allaire.com (http://www.allaire.com) . . . has lots of buttons (and associated keyboard shortcuts) for routine HTML tags . . . and you CAN edit .cgi and .pl pages within the program, which is WONDERFUL when searching out multiple replace functions - the extended search and replace utility is amazing[nbsp][nbsp]can build a file list through any number of layers of directories and subdirectories.[nbsp][nbsp]It's preview "browser" is a little weak and won't properly lay out a few HTML tricks - but I prefer to browse with NS or MSIE directly off the hard drive as I code anyway.

For a plain text editor, I like Notepad Light, a freeware program from www.notetab.com (http://www.notetab.com)

[Mandi]

Oh, and maybe this is an obvious tip - but once you've established a "look" to a site - make a template.html page, and use it to build new stuff - big time saver, big mistake avoider!!

[Rich]

I agree with Mandi, Home Site is a very nice editor. And, so is Dreamweaver. If you buy the Dreamweaver/Fireworks bundle (from macromedia.com) they throw in Home Site. An excellent bundle.

I still use a plain text editor (notepad/wordpad) a lot, too, even with all these tools (plus FrontPage). I just grab the tool that will allow me to do the task at hand in the shortest amount of time.

(You might also want to search this forum for "editors" as this topic has come up before and you will get many more opinions on tool choices/options.)

Rich

[Carol-H]

I use and recommend Arachnophilia for editing/creating HTML.[nbsp][nbsp]It's free, easy to use, and full of features (most of which I don't use 'cause I don't WANT all the extra help, thank you very much (don't ask how I feel about MS Word these days!)).

- Carol Hanson
[nbsp][nbsp]www.dragonbear.com (http://www.dragonbear.com)[nbsp][nbsp]

[brainiac-d]

I like Dreamweaver because it writes nice code, and has some cool DHTML. Although I mostly use Notepad. It's my favorite.
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Come and visit my website!
http://www.xs.mw/brainiac-d

[Jason]

OK, here's a question for everyone. I prefer when doing HTML editing to just use a plain old text editor. However, sometimes it's a real irritant to have to type in all the "over-and-over" tags (paragraph, line break, etc) and also find it tiresome to have to type in all the table tags.

I don't want to switch to an HTML editor - I like doing it by hand.

What I would absolutely love to have is an HTML keyboard - something where, instead of the number pad over on the right side, instead there were buttons that would automatically enter the most-used HTML tags.

Does anyone know if anyone makes these? And if so, where can I get one. And if not, *why*???

Thanks,

Jason

[fuddmain]

Actually there are text editors that can, somewhat, fill the bill:

NoteTab Pro (www.notetab.com (http://www.notetab.com))- It has clipbooks where you can setup your tags and then double click on them to wrap them around the text.[nbsp][nbsp]I've used this editor for 2 years and I'm as fast with it as I would be with any WYSIWYG editor.

However, I've recently switched to VIM (www.vim.org (http://www.vim.org)) and love it.[nbsp][nbsp]It has a bit of a learning curve, but you can set it up to insert tags with special keystrokes.[nbsp][nbsp]The beauty is once you get the hang of it your hands never have to leave the keyboard.[nbsp][nbsp]It's also great for any programming you might want to do like Perl or PHP.[nbsp][nbsp]Best of all it's free.

Give one or both of these editors a try and I'm sure you'll be pleased.

----------------

Brian

"VIM is zen." - Matt Corks

[Charles Capps]

I'm with Deb in using UltraEdit...[nbsp][nbsp]:)

[jokesplus]

You could also try editplus for editing by hand.[nbsp][nbsp]Has a toolbar for most html tags.[nbsp][nbsp]For tables has an excel style menu, where you select how columns and rows, and then it inserts all the table tags.

Jarrod

[Mandi]

Homesite has ctrl+ ___ type keyboard shortcuts for nearly all of the vital tags, as well as "tag completion" for tags that require closing tags.[nbsp][nbsp]You can, for example, highlight all the relavent text, and then use ctrl+b to get bold tags around the text in question.

[ugarfie]

OK, I guess I will keep to the old notepad / word pad. I just thought that using an editor would make life easier. But every time I start using NS Composer, or Coffee Cup, when I go back to the plain old notepad, I have all this extra junk on my pages.:(

Well thanks for you alls input.

Ursula
:) :)

www.psalmus.net (http://www.psalmus.net)

[sheila]

OK, I guess I will keep to the old notepad / word pad. I just thought that using an editor would make life easier. But every time I start using NS Composer, or Coffee Cup, when I go back to the plain old notepad, I have all this extra junk on my pages.
You will not have all that "extra junk" if you use Homesite, Dreamweaver, and many of the other plain text editors suggested such as Ultra Pad. Do stay away from WYSIWYG editors in general. So far as I've heard, DreamWeaver is the only one that doesn't insert all that extra junk.

[stan]

I'm using Dreamweaver and vi (VIM). DW for layout, frames, cascaded style sheets (CSS), PHP script elements.

DW writes clean HTML code (although the generated JavaScript could be better), and makes it easy to seperate functionality (PHP/MySQL), layout (HTML) and styles (CSS), esp. when using a linked style sheet that is shared by all pages of a site!

Vi is great for formatting code, regular expressions, programming (almost no WYSIWYG editor can just jump to a certain line number, something you need when writing PHP code). Being a editor with a seperate cammand and insert mode, it has a steep learning curve, I agree with Brian.

- Stan

[Rich]

What I would absolutely love to have is an HTML keyboard - something where, instead of the number pad over on the right side, instead there were buttons that would automatically enter the most-used HTML tags.

Well, IMHO, the very best programmer's editor is CodeWright. It is totally programmable (like I said, it is a programmer's editor :-) for tag/code completion, indentation, color, etc., etc. We use it for all our assembly, C, Perl, html, etc. coding. It will literally save you hours of work (once you get past the initial learning curve, that is). Oh yes, and it supports Perl as a macro language.

Rich