Web authoring system

Draft

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.

• NoteTab light
• HTML Kit

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)
• PSPad (Windows)
• (X)Emacs (Most systems)
• JEdit (Most systems)

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.
  • related Firefox (en_US) 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.
  • related Firefox (en_US) page.
  • Firebug Keyboard Shortcuts

• 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 :)
  • Firefox page.

• 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

• Web Developer Toolbar

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

• eXe

Links

• Free HTML Editors, Web Editors, and WYSIWYG Web Editors and Site Builders
• Sourceforge search for HTML + Editor