Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Power Tools

In Chapter 2, you built your first XHTML page with nothing but a text editor and a lot of nerve. This is how all Web-page whiz kids begin their careers. To really understand XHTML (and to establish your XHTML street cred), you need to start from scratch.

However, very few Web authors stick with plain text editors or use them to create anything other than simple test pages. That’s because the average XHTML page is filled with tedious detail. If you have to write every paragraph, line break, and formatting tag by hand, you’ll probably make a mistake somewhere along the way. Even if you don’t err, it’s hard to visualize a finished page when you spend all day staring at angle brackets. This is especially true when you tackle more complex pages, like those that introduce graphics or use multicolumn layouts.

There’s a definite downside to outgrowing Notepad or TextEdit—namely, it can get expensive. Professional Web design tools can cost hundreds of dollars. At one point, software companies planned to include basic Web editors as a standard part of operating systems like Windows and Mac OS. In fact, some older versions of Windows shipped with a scaled-down Web editor called FrontPage Express, and Mac OS includes a severely truncated editor called iWeb, which limits you to ready-made templates and doesn’t let you touch a line of XHTML. But if you want a full-featured Web page editor—one that catches your errors, helps you remember important XHTML elements, ...