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
List of editing software
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 with HTML support
There are lots of editors with HTML support, e.g.
- Notepad++ (Windows)
- Lightweight and easy to use, does good syntax highlightning but no indentation
- Has a rather large library of plugins.
- PSPad (Windows).
- Lightweight and easy to use, does syntax highlighting, but no indentation (too bad !)
- Only thing you need to know is: "CTRL-space" will open a popup for contextual code completion
- (X)Emacs (Most systems, that's what I prefer, but young people have trouble with this.)
- JEdit (Most systems)
- This is a more complex editor than PSPad or similar, ok for programmers.
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 tools
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- Microsoft FrontPage
Other editing 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.
Useful browser extensions
Most tools don't provide you with enough information about what you are doing. Browser extensions, in particular for Firefox, can help.
Firefox
- HTML VALIDATOR is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.
- FireBug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. There also is a light version based on JavaScript that you can use with any browser.
- Greasemonkey A quite spectacular extension that allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at UserScripts.org
- Web Developer. Tells you most everything about your HTML page.
- Important: To install the DOM Inspector you must reinstall the browser choosing the 'Custom' and 'Developer Tools' options (if not already done so). You won't loose any personal settings, just do it :)
- XML Developer Toolbar. For XML development. Schema and DTD Generation, Various validation, XSLT on the fly.
Find more through the Tools/add-ons menu of the Firefox browser.
IE
Find more through the IE Tools/extensions menu...
Note: IE is not well know for extensions, but there are some other useful extensions for other purposes (e.g. videodownloads). Some are payware.
Opera
Get at least the developer console and DOM snapshot from the Opera tools page. Installing add-ons with Opera is really easy.
Software of particular interest to education
These systems offer additional functionality, e.g. can export to IMS Content Packaging.
- Commercial
- Adobe Dreamweaver (with the free CourseBuilder extension)
- Free