Painting the Web

Web Design Tools

This last section is a brief review of some tools and utilities that can help you create your web designs. In addition, the very end of this chapter includes a list of additional reading that will help you continue your explorations in the mysteries and magic of web design.

Editors

Any text editor can be used for building web pages. My first web page editor was vi, a Unix command-line tool, a variation of which (vim) I still use for most of my web page editing. Others use Notepad or some variation in Windows, Textpad in the Mac, or emacs, a competitor of the earlier vi.

Some editors provide a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface that can be used to display the changes as they're made. Others go beyond this and provide forms and fields to fill in, which then generate the HTML and CSS.

For the simplest type of text editing, you can use Notepad and its more modern variations on Windows, and Textpad, as well as vi and emacs for the Mac and Linux, respectively.

For a step above a plain-text tool, you have the WYSIWYG tools, such as BBEdit for the Mac and HotDog Pro for Windows. One of the first HTML editing tools I used was the earliest version of HotDog. Most tools are either freely available or provide a 30-day trial, which allows you to check out several before settling on one.

A new tool I tried while writing this book was the open source Bluefish, available for Linux/FreeBSD and other Unix environments, as well as the Mac. I was able to install it on my Mac ...