website creation

[53ph1r07h]

okay, so me and a couple of buddies at school are making a website at school for extra credit, we know the topic and subject and whatnot but, i just don't know which program to use to begin the creation-ness, any help?

[bascule]

Try HoTMetaL

[Dak]

why would it not be hand-developed, out of interest?

 

also: don't use 'leet-speak' for you thread name/in your post, it's gay

[Klaynos]

You'll want, notepad... you should have it...

 

 

(lol Dak!)

[Pangloss]

Most decent web sites (note sites not pages, hint hint) are far too complex to rate the curmugeonly, nostalgic reference to Notepad.

 

I use Visual Web Developer from Microsoft. It's basically Dreamweaver for free. The new 2008 version has very nice CSS support, plus intellisense for JavaScript (although there are better Javascript tools out there). It's a very slick HTML editor.

 

And, as I say, it's free.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/#webInstall

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I've worked with gedit for a while (Linux's default text editor). If you know what you're doing, you can get away with using any text-editor with syntax highlighting.

 

If you want something drag-and-drop, I'd suggest Nvu or what Pangloss linked to.

[mooeypoo]

Try HoTMetaL

NVU is free.. and quite good: http://www.nvu.com/ (replaced by "Kompozer" which is also free: http://www.kompozer.net/)

 

read a bit about html, xhtml, and CSS would be my suggestion, then start experimenting with it and building your site

[Klaynos]

Most decent web sites (note sites not pages, hint hint) are far too complex to rate the curmugeonly, nostalgic reference to Notepad.

 

I use Visual Web Developer from Microsoft. It's basically Dreamweaver for free. The new 2008 version has very nice CSS support, plus intellisense for JavaScript (although there are better Javascript tools out there). It's a very slick HTML editor.

 

And, as I say, it's free.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/#webInstall

 

Most pro web developers write their xhtml/css/js/etc... by hand.

 

And frankly would laugh at your above comment.

 

I like gedit, sytax highlighting is great or scite in windows....

 

But if you really want a silly dreamweaver like program I'd recommend nvu. Still pumps out shit code but it's not end of the world awful.

[mooeypoo]

Yeha, the only reason I'm using dreamweaver is to see my hand-written code visually at the second i'm writing it... I *rarely* use the WYSIWYG window.

 

I am not too fond of NVU because it doesn't support php very well, so I use notepad++ for code highlighting, or just dreamweaver because I got used to it's comfortable way of suggesting tag closures (matter of habbit).

 

Anyways, the OP sounded like he's looking for something quite basic -- I doubt he can start writing html by hand just yet. Starting out with a WYSIWYG editors might be a better idea for him/her, at least until (s)he's better at reading and writing the code.

 

Microsoft in GENERAL is terrible for writing HTML... (just look at IE7!!!!!!! AAA!!!), and throughout its history it inserted crap-code inside your pages and bloated them. I wouldn't recommend using it, and if someone's starting out -- then it's best they don't get used to it at all.

 

~moo

[doG]

I kind of like Notepad++ for code creation-ness....

[mooeypoo]

Yeah it;'s pretty good, I just prefer to have a WYSIWYG bit to be able to actually see my code WHILE i code it

it's a matter of habbit.

[Pangloss]

Most pro web developers write their xhtml/css/js/etc... by hand.

 

No, they really don't. Students and teachers and hobbyists use hand coding. And that's fine, so long as you don't mind a strictly linear relationship between labor hours and output. People who want to make as much money as they possibly can in the shortest amount of time they can possibly do it in use editing-and-site-management suites, which exponentially improve the relationship between labor hours and output.

 

That's not to say that knowing how to do it by hand is irrelevent -- just the opposite in fact. You regularly have to drop into the code and change things or edit them or arrange them "just so". The more you know about HTML, the easier that is. Especially tables -- the bane of every new HTML student's existence.

 

I also teach new web developers at my university, by the way. We do introduce them to HTML (as well as CSS and XML) in Notepad, but then we move on to more complex systems (typically Dreamweaver for the design students and Visual Studio for the technical/programming students).

 

 

I like gedit, sytax highlighting is great or scite in windows....

 

But if you really want a silly dreamweaver like program I'd recommend nvu. Still pumps out shit code but it's not end of the world awful.

 

No, it really doesn't. Well I don't know NVU, maybe IT does. Early WYSIWYG editors did produce serious spaghetti HTML, but that hasn't been an issue in quite a few years.

[Klaynos]

No, they really don't. Students and teachers and hobbyists use hand coding. And that's fine, so long as you don't mind a strictly linear relationship between labor hours and output. People who want to make as much money as they possibly can in the shortest amount of time they can possibly do it in use editing-and-site-management suites, which exponentially improve the relationship between labor hours and output.

 

Well your experiances are opposite of mine working with one quite large development company that had a large web team, an ms gold partner, where they would have been laughed at if they'd used a graphical editor because the code they pump out is so shit. And also working with another smaller web dev company, and known many many people in the industry. The code the graphical editors produce is just not good enough.

 

You have to spend far too much time editing it to try and get it through the validators and the accessibility rules. And if you say pros don't bother with that I will have even less respect for your opinions.

[doG]

No, they really don't. Students and teachers and hobbyists use hand coding. And that's fine, so long as you don't mind a strictly linear relationship between labor hours and output.

 

If that were true programs written in C or C++ would disappear because they take much longer to develope that software written in a higher level language like BASIC.

 

As a professional coder myself I NEVER use a wysiwyg!

[Pangloss]

Who said anything about using WYSIWYG? I think you're confusing my defense of whether WYSIWYG editors produce spaghetti code (they don't) as a statement that we use them. That wasn't my intent in my post above -- I was saying that we step up from Notepad to more powerful editing and site management tools (like Dreamweaver and Visual Studio), but not really for their WYSIWYG features. Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editor is useful, I often run it in split screen mode just to see the immediate appearance of what I'm doing, but I'm still working in HTML.

 

If that's what you meant by "hand-coding", Klaynos, then I agree. I will occassionally drop into WYSIWYG for something simple, but for any complex project I agree that the code has to be worked out carefully. But it's not so much because the WYSIWYG editor puts out mangled code as it is so that I will know what's going on in there, so I can refer to it programmatically.

 

Of course these days every style element is controlled by CSS, and I don't typically write out that XML by hand, although I know many do. I know the syntax, but on a big job I usually find it faster to use the GUI CSS tool in either Dw or now VS2008 (which is basically ripped straight from Dw -- I'm AMAZED Microsoft hasn't been sued by Adobe over that). That's nice because I can bash out major style changes and see the immediate effect on all the pages, but even then I'll typically go over the XML it produces carefully to make sure I know what's in there.

 

That's how it works. I don't believe that your MS Gold Partner would shun the use of Visual Studio and knock out ASP.NET "by hand" in Notepad. Most Partners (I am a Partner, by the way) actually see those higher-level Visual Studio versions as the main reason for being a partner (gold status is tens of thousands of dollars per year). Here are 2 million posts from Partners and other ASP.NET coders who clearly work the same way, or they wouldn't be posting in those forums.

 

And that's true of programming languages as well, doG. If it weren't, there would be no JBuilder or NetBeans either, and those are great programs. (I actually had a professor for a Java class in my graduate program who did all his Java work in Visual Studio just because he liked the editor better. Go figure.)

[Klaynos]

I wasn't defending notepad, I was arguing against WYSIWYG. I think we must have got our lines crossed.

[Pangloss]

That's fine, I could have been more clear.

 

You can laugh at me about using a GUI CSS tool if you want. I do get some ribbing about that sometimes.

 

------------

 

By the way, just to give another example of something that really seems to cry out automatic HTML generation, I would point to image slicing. A lot of really creative and artistic interfaces (well, ones that use HTML, as opposed to Flash or some other approach) really have to be designed all as one element, in some sort of program like Photoshop or Fireworks or Illustrator, etc, and then broken up into smaller images placed in carefully aligned table cells.

 

So you lay out the whole visual appearance of the page, including menus and a top banner and so forth, and when you're done you use the Slice tool to hack it up into pieces. The advantage of slicing (whether you do it by hand or in a tool like Photoshop) is easy control of resizability for different resolutions, shortening download times, and easy implementation of graphical "run-overs" that would otherwise require extremely complex CSS layering.

 

The advantage of having Photoshop or Fireworks write that HTML for you is that it's faster and easier than doing it yourself. Because of the precision and tedium of lining up what could be hundreds of small images, and the need to have them all coordinated and logically named for programmatic access, this kind of task just SCREAMS for automated creation.

[53ph1r07h]

uhhh... thanks?