For Your Toolbox

Abstract: This document provides a short, Macintosh-biased, summary of tools that you may find useful as you develop web pages.

• HTML Verification
• Text Editing
• Site Generation
• WYSIWYG Editors

HTML Verification

In general, you will do your HTML verification online, using one of the free services available. I tend to use the one at URL http://www.webtchs.com/html-val-svc.

Text Editing

For Macintosh users, BBEdit is an excellent text edition tool that seems to be the first choice of many web designers. Among other things, it allows you to replace text on a set of pages, rather than one page at a time (great for automating small updates). It's a little bit pricey (about $80.00 academic), but probably worth it. They also have a less-powerful free version available that may suffice for getting started. You can learn about BBEdit on their web site, http://www.barebones.com.

Site Generation

ASML, the automated site markup language, provides a simple yet powerful environment for doing site-wide authoring. When you want to ensure uniform formatting for your pages, and realize that you may need to reconfigure your site, ASML is an excellent choice. ASML also builds a nice search facility for your site. ASML is freely available. You can find basic information on ASML at URL http://devlab.dartmouth.edu/asml/. Contact the author, Charles Owen (cowen@cs.dartmouth.edu) for more information. (I believe that there is an invited talk on ASML at this year's EdMedia conference.)

I've developed a small suite of tools to help me build and rebuild my web sites. You can find information on these tools at URL http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Tools/SSS/ . The tools include:

• A utility for automatically generating the table of contents of a page.
• A utility for generating HTML from text documents (I use it so that I don't have to write the "obvious" HTML in my pages).
• A utility for segmenting longer pages (currently under development).

WYSIWYG Editors

I'm generally opposed to WYSIWYG editors for a number of reasons detailed elsewhere. If you feel otherwise, you might consider PageMill (and SiteMill) from Adobe, FrontPage from Microsoft, Navigator Gold from Netscape, or HoTMeTAL Pro. None of these tools give you the power and control of something like ASML, but some provide useful and usable features, such as SiteMill's automatic checking of all your links.

Since Netscape usually allows educators to use their applications for free, Navigator Gold may be your best bet, although it may not have all the features of some of the others.

This page written by Samuel A. Rebelsky.

This page generated on 57 by SamR's Site Suite.