Web authoring system
Definition
A web authoring system is software to produce webcontents. They range from simple HTML editors to fairly sophisticated integrated development environments.
Today, a lot of web contents are not produced with web authoring systems, but with portalware of various kinds (and that include learning management systems
Popular systems
Tools for web programming are not included here.
- Free HTML structure editors
There are dozens of available systems. We don't have time to evaluate these. See also XML editors to edit XHTML, SVG etc.
Daniel K. Schneider can recommend both these systems, but prefers to use a programming editor, e.g. (X)Emacs.
- Programmer's editors
Again, there are lots of editors with HTML support, e.g.
See [Free text editors] (Wikipedia) for a full list and also the Comparison of text editors.
- Free HTML WYSIWYG Web Editors
- NVU. A fairly nice editor. Good for beginners. The more recent Kompozer can also edit XHTML.
- Mozilla SeaMonkey Suite (a followup from the earlier Mozilla browser that includes a navigator, a composer and an email client).
- Amaya, The W3C sponsored test browser and editor.
Wikipedia has a list of some Free HTML editors
- Commercial Mid or High End
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- Microsoft FrontPage
- Other software
- Some word processors like Framemaker can be configure for single source HTML/XML/PDF production.
- (future?) versions of Office XP.
- Open Office
- Presentation software can export to HTML
See also document standard, since one can produce HTML from any reasonbly well defined document format.
For education
These systems offer additional functionality, e.g. can export to IMS Content Packaging.
- Commercial
- Adobe Dreamweaver (with the free CourseBuilder extension)
- Free