Skip to Main Content
Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition
book

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

by Matthew MacDonald
May 2011
Beginner content levelBeginner
584 pages
17h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4. Power Tools

In Chapter 2, you built your first HTML page with nothing but a text editor and a lot of nerve—the same way all web-page whiz kids begin their careers. To really understand HTML (and to establish your HTML 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. The average HTML page is filled with tedious detail. Try 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, 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.

The downside to outgrowing Notepad or TextEdit is the expense. Professional web design tools can cost hundreds of dollars. At one point, software companies planned to include basic web editors as 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. (Most Macs include a severely truncated editor called iWeb, which limits you to ready-made templates and doesn’t let you touch a line of HTML.) But if you want a full-featured web page editor—one that catches your errors, helps you remember important HTML elements, and lets you manage your entire site—you have to find one on your own. Fortunately, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Matthew MacDonald
Learn to Build a Website

Learn to Build a Website

Cassidy Williams, Camryn Williams

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449306823Supplemental ContentErrata Page