SPINNING THE WEB

If you are familiar with HTML commands, you can use a simple text editor such as Emacs, Vi, or Kwrite to design your homepage. Most text editors recognize the HTML command set and give you syntax highlighting for tags. For a few simple pages, this approach might look useful, but you will soon start to lose track of large-scale projects. Luckily, many third party tools provide additional features for more complex projects. Text-based HTML editors, that is text editors that specialize in HTML, expect the user to provide the necessary HTML skills. In contrast, web generators allow you to create a page as you would with a graphics package. After completing the layout, the tool then generates the Internet page. The results in the browser may be completely different from the view in the web generator due to the restrictions that HTML imposes. So-called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors provide a useful compromise. Again, you can click and point to create the layout, but the editor restricts you to HTML compliant features.